“Only a small part of today’s gender earnings gap is due to discrimination.” – Nobel prize winner Claudia Goldin, Career & Family (p 153)

Coming into this work a decade ago, I used to get riled up every time I thought about the gender wage gap. “It’s unfair that I will average 20% less in earnings simply because I’m a woman!” I thought.

After diving deep (really deep) into this area, it’s clear the explanation behind why the gender wage gap exists (and persists) is much more complex.  

Claudia Goldin, who won the Nobel Prize in 2023 because of her work on the economics of women, notes that

• About 1/3 of the gender wage gap is due to occupational segregation (e.g., there are more women teachers than construction workers, and construction workers make more) 
• About 2/3 of the gender wage gap is due to overall hours and predictability – men tend to work slightly more hours per week, have fewer “career breaks” and are more open to unpredictable, “on call”, hours.  In other words, women tend to avoid the “greedy work” that carries outsized paychecks

To be sure, there are certainly cases of blatant discrimination (check out our upcoming interview with an employment lawyer if you think this may be happening to you), but it appears this is the exception.  

When I step back and look at the vast majority of what is driving the gender wage gap, I can’t help but think of something my friend (and badass journalist) Katherine Goldstein once said to me: “It’s not a gender wage gap; it’s just the motherhood penalty.”

Consider this graph, produced by a researcher using Denmark data (a country with a smaller wage gap than the US and a full year of paid parental leave): 

We can conclude that the motherhood penalty explains more of the gender wage gap than the traditional explanations of “occupational segregation” and “men work more, and less predictable hours.”

Given all this, here’s the graph I wish someone had handed me at 18:

Note: I rely heavily on Claudia Goldin’s book Career & Family in writing this piece.  It’s dense, but awesome. Highly recommend.