Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Disparities in Outcomes from Gender-Based Biases

(Social Equity and Race)

Gaps in both labor market outcomes and time use between women and men are well established. Among full-time, full-year workers, U.S. women’s wages stand about 80 percent of men’s and women 15 or older spend about 44 percent more hours caring for and helping others in their household and about 10 percent less time working than men. Such differences could reflect conscious and unconscious views how women and men should allocate their time. About half of the respondents to a 2013 Pew Research Center survey said children are better off if a mother is home and does not hold a job, whereas 8 percent said that about a father. A plurality of adults (42 percent) said in 2012 that having a mother who works part time is ideal for young children, whereas 33 percent said that having a mother who does not work outside the home is ideal. In contrast, 75 percent of fathers who have children younger than 18 said they believe working full time is ideal. About half of the respondents said in 2013 that the trend in women working for pay makes it harder for a marriage to succeed.

Such biases favoring men in the workplace and women in the household may not necessarily affect all individuals or entities in the same way. Society as a whole might benefit from having more gender neutral views and adopt policies that reduce biases while individual employers might want to acknowledge biases and develop policies to attract and retain needed workers. For example, an employer might want to adopt policies with liberal child care and flexible work arrangements to attract and retain skilled women. However, adoption of such policies might have the unintended consequence of perpetuating gender based biases about employment and household, as results in the first paper in this session suggest.

Papers in this session each present research that is focused on one aspect of the outcomes from conscious or unconscious gender-based biases. The first paper sets the stage by estimating the influence of norms on time use and labor market outcomes. It provides the session with an overview the potential influences of biases and set the stage for a discussion of how they might differentially affect policy outcomes at the societal and individual level. The second paper has an international focus and shows how social attitudes towards working women differentially affect marriage rates for women at different skill levels. The third paper examines the incentives of one employer to develop workplace policies that are work-life friendly to retained skilled women workers. The two discussants, Cynthia Hess from the Institute for Women's Policy Research and Adriana Kugler from Georgetown University, will focus on how gender-based norms and attitudes might affect outcomes of family-friendly policies for society, employers, and worker and engage the audience in discussion about the factors that must be considered when developing such policies, both at the macro (societal) and micro (employer) levels.