Gender Gaps at Home and at Work
Paper Session
Friday, Jan. 3, 2025 2:30 PM - 4:30 PM (PST)
- Chair: Maya Rossin-Slater, Stanford University
The Effects of Mandated Maternity Leave on Young Women’s Labor Market Outcomes
Abstract
Over 148 countries now offer at least ten weeks of paid maternity leave (Hyland et al. 2020). These laws have limited long-run effects on the wages and employment of new mothers (e.g., Lalive et al. 2009, Bailey et al. 2019). But how do they affect young women in anticipation of motherhood? This paper studies the effects of a 2017 Indian law that increased the duration of paid maternity leave from 12 to 26 weeks, using linked employer-employee social security records covering the universe of formal sector workers, and the universe of LinkedIn profiles from India. We exploit pre-reform variation in the duration of leave offered by organizations along with policy-induced variation in who between the government or employer pays for leave, to ask (i) whether employers hire fewer women as a result or reduce wages, (ii) how the reform alters women’s career trajectories (occupations, promotions), and (iii) the extent to which any reduced hiring of women is driven by a motive to avoid the direct cost of paid leave versus the indirect cost of replacing workers. The final question is particularly salient in developing countries, many of which have recently expanded paid maternity leave policies (India in 2017, Nigeria in 2018, and Pakistan in 2020) and where the employer and social security administration typically share its direct cost.Productivity After Childbirth: Evidence from Physicians
Abstract
Work interruptions are common and often long-lasting among women. These disruptions impose large private costs for workers; however, less understood is whether these worker absences also generate externalities for consumers --- particularly in care settings, where women are concentrated. This paper quantifies these potential externalities by studying the impacts of a physician's childbirth--- a common interruption to women's work --- on physicians' productivity, patient-provider relationships, and patients' outcomes using administrative insurance claims data from California. We find that childbirth leads to a substantial, but short-lived, disruption in the availability of female physicians (relative to male physicians). This interruption has modest costs for consumers: after a physician's childbirth, patients are more likely to see a new provider, but are not less likely to obtain care, to have an adverse outcome, or to accept preventative care. In future work, we will explore whether firms or consumers take costly actions to buffer against the impacts of provider absences.Firm Provision of Fertility Preserving Technologies
Abstract
This paper studies the labor market implications of rising trends in the availability and adoption of fertility-preserving technologies. We focus on “egg-freezing” technologies, which allow women to preserve their reproductive potential by extracting and storing their oocytes (“eggs”). While governments across the world have started to consider covering the costs of egg freezing for non-medical reasons, many employers, led by major U.S. firms, are already facilitating women’s take up by covering the costs of the procedure. In 2020, more than 20% of large U.S. employers covered the costs of egg-freezing for their female employees. We study employer motives to supply egg-freezing benefits through the lens of an incomplete contracting model, emphasizing how this benefit can serve as a screening device for more career-oriented women, might increase productivity of treated employees, and serve as a retention device. We then validate the intuition provided by the theoretical framework with a large-scale survey of U.S. employers and data on contracts between employers, fertility-benefits provides, and female employees. To complement insights on the employer side with information on women’s preferences, we elicit their willingness to pay for the technology, how they reason about take up, and how they think it will affect their labor market choices.Discussant(s)
Amalia Miller
,
University of Virginia
Heather Sarsons
,
University of British Columbia
Tom Vogl
,
University of California-San Diego
Sydnee Caldwell
,
University of California-Berkeley
JEL Classifications
- J3 - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs
- J1 - Demographic Economics