Men are more willing to be overworked than women. That could be why the pay gap between the genders has persisted over time, according to a new paper by sociology professors at Indiana University and Cornell.
The paper’s authors, Youngjoo Cha and Kim A. Weeden, were curious about why the gap seemed to be closing steadily in the 1970s and 1980s, narrowed more slowly in the 1990s and then leveled off in the 2000s. Their theory: Employers have increasingly expected workers to put in greater numbers of hours on the job and have rewarded them more for overwork as time has gone on. Men were more likely to work long hours, they posited, which meant their compensation remained higher than women’s.
To prove their theory, Cha and Weeden analyzed 30 years’ worth of wage data from the government’s Current Population Survey, starting in 1979 and ending in 2009. According to that data, in 1979, professional women made 70% of what men earned. The gap narrowed to 75% by 1991 but then leveled off in the late ‘90s through 2009, to 76%.
At the same time, overwork has increased. In the early ‘80s, fewer than 9% of workers (13% of men and just 3% of women) worked 50 hours per week or more. While not many workers put in extra hours, they also didn’t earn more for their labors, unless they were in jobs where overtime pay was part of their contract. Instead they simply made less per hour. By 2000, more than 14% of workers (19% of men and 7% of women), put in more than 50 hours a week. Though overwork dipped in the mid-2000s, today the trend persists. What’s changed is that employers have come to expect greater time commitments from workers, and they also pay more for overwork, write the authors.
Between 1970 and 2007, the growth of overwork and the pay premium for it, widened the gender pay gap by 10%, write the authors, which they say cancelled out the pay gains women have gotten from more education, including earning more college degrees than men.
Why don’t women overwork themselves at the same rate as men? Cha and Weeden say that despite men taking a greater role in housework and child care, we still expect women to be the ones who assume most of the responsibility on the home front. “[E]ssentialist beliefs about female caregiving continue to be a dominant cultural ideology even among people who endorse gender egalitarianism,” they write.