Researchers for the American Sociological Review may have found an explanation for why the gender pay gap persists: it all comes down to who is more willing to stay back longer in the office.
Despite women’s progress and increasing presence in the workforce, the gender pay gap continued to persist over the past three decades and the new research claims that the gender pay gap could come down to a matter of overtime, with men more likely than women to be putting in more than 50 hours of work. The modern workforce expectations, the study suggests, is “perpetuating old forms of gender inequality”.
According to Quartz, the study documents the shift towards longer work hours over the past three decades and the exacerbated gender pay gap, and found that almost 20% of American men worked 50 hours or more per week in 2000 — compared to only 7% of women and the extra hours result in an extra 6% in hourly wages across all occupations.
While the study found that overtime expectations are gender neutral, with employers not specifying separate expectations for their male and female employees, nor systematically rewarding men who overwork more than women, it suggests that the ability for staff to work longer hours rests on a foundation that is itself highly gendered — in other words, those employees who work longer hours do so only with the support of other household members, usually women, who shoulder the lion’s share of household duties.
Other factors contributed to this include the fact that women are less likely to choose positions where longer hours are embedded in the organisational culture, and the fact they are responsible for the majority of housework and childcare and therefore can’t offer as much of their time to outside-hours (and paid) work.
And the extra hours are significant, not only for extra pay, but for career progression. The research suggests that the disparity in overtime not only widens the gender pay gap by 10% but those who work more overtime are more likely to end up at the top of the corporate ladder because employers are likely to view these employees as hard-working and more deserving of leadership positions.
What do you think about the results of this study?