The Gender Pay Gap Begins to Increase Sharply at Age of 30

Annekatrin Schrenker and Aline Zucco

DIW Weekly Report, 2020, vol. 10, issue 10, 75-82

Abstract: The gender pay gap increases with age: While the average gross hourly wage gap between male and female 30-year-olds is nine percent, the gap triples to 28 percent by the age of 50. This stark increase is due to differences in employment behavior in the decades between the ages of 30 and 50. Beginning at age 30, women often switch to part-time work to be able to provide childcare, whereas men tend to increase the number of working hours at the same age. Because part-time work is, on average, paid more poorly per hour and part-time workers less frequently hold leadership positions, the average wages of women between 30 and 50 years of age remain virtually constant. In contrast, the average wages per hour for men continue to increase with age. Measures focusing on improving work-life balance must be taken to combat this pay gap. Such measures include restructuring work environments by allowing two part-time employees to share one executive position and increasing the amount of months of parental leave earmarked to one partner.

Keywords: Gender Pay Gap; Part-time employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J11 J13 J16 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.741919.de/dwr-20-10-1.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwdwr:dwr10-10-1

Access Statistics for this article

DIW Weekly Report is currently edited by Tomaso Duso, Marcel Fratzscher, Peter Haan, Claudia Kemfert, Alexander Kritikos, Alexander Kriwoluzky, Stefan Liebig, Lukas Menkhoff, Karsten Neuhoff, Carsten Schröder, Katharina Wrohlich and Sabine Fiedler

More articles in DIW Weekly Report from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().