UK gender pay gap for higher-educated parents has grown since 1970s – study

theguardian.com:

The pay gap between mothers and fathers with post-school education has increased since the late 1970s in the UK, according to research.

As the world marks International Women’s Day on Wednesday, research from the University of Kent has found that the gap in pay between higher-educated mothers and fathers – the “motherhood penalty” – is greater now than 40 years ago.

Dr Amanda Gosling, a senior lecturer in economics at the University of Kent, argues that the closing of the pay gap between men and women since the 1970s has largely been driven by economic factors such as the minimum wage and falling wages for less educated men, rather than societal progress.

“Barriers to career progression for mothers with some post-school education have hardly shifted,” she said. “The gap in pay between mothers and fathers looks very similar now as it did in the late 1970s. The story for Gen-Xers is the same for boomers and the millennials.”

According to data from the Office for National Statistics, based on the Annual Survey for Hours and Earnings (ASHE), the gender pay gap for full-time employees was 8.3% in 2022, up from 7.7% in 2021. Among all employees, the gender pay gap is 14.9%.

But Gosling said the gap for mothers was considerably larger than the one represented by the official gender pay gap. By her calculations, the hourly wages of mothers is 72% of the hourly wage of fathers, which reflects the fact that working mums are stalled in their career path, and less likely to go into the highest-paid roles.

She said her work, which splices microdata from the Family Expenditure Survey (1978-1999) and the Family Resources Survey (2000-2021), gave a fuller explanation of the extent of the “motherhood penalty”.

The research suggests that for