Even in Family-Friendly Scandinavia, Mothers Are Paid Less<br />Despite generous social policies, women who work full-time there are still paid 15 percent to 20 percent<br />less than men, new research shows — a gender pay gap similar to that in the United States.<br />“It does become a distinction in the eyes of employers between potential male and female workers, and it may reinforce traditional gender roles.”<br />One new study, which used a data set including everyone in Denmark from 1980 to 2013, along with details about their jobs and families, found<br />that while there was a pay gap before people had children, it was relatively small and earnings were increasing at similar rates.<br />“At the very least, men have to take a larger role,” said Francine Blau, an economist at Cornell who has studied the gender pay gap<br />and family-friendly policies in the United States and Europe.<br />But as long as mothers, and not fathers, are the ones using policies like paid leave<br />and taking on the additional work at home after having children, the lifetime pay inequity seems certain to remain.<br />“Equal work is in practice not an option for most women, because they have to take care of the children<br />and therefore have different kinds of jobs and different kinds of hours,” said Henrik Kleven, an economist at Princeton, who wrote the paper with Jakob Egholt Sogaard, an economist at the University of Copenhagen, and Camille Landais, an economist at the London School of Economics.<br />A series of recent studies shows that in both the United States and Europe, the gender pay gap is much smaller until the first child arrives.<br />As in the United States, the pay gap in Denmark has shrunk over time as women have<br />become better educated than men and more likely to be professionals or managers.
