CEO Children and Gender Wage Gap
If you’re a woman interested in equal pay in the workplace it might be helpful to learn the sex of any children your CEO has. Your workplace pay parity may be influenced by the answer.
Even in the most egalitarian countries in the world, say Denmark, pay inequality exists. “Not only does the Danish government keep comprehensive demographic statistics on the entire population, including every Danish company, but if the pay gap is still occurring in such an egalitarian society, it suggests the pay gap is not the intentional result of policy,” says David Gaddis Ross of Columbia Business School, Columbia University.
He along with Michael Dahl of Aalborg University in Denmark, Christian Dezso of the University of Maryland decided to examine possible social and psychological factors that might influence the gender wage gap that they estimated was on average 9%-18% less than men who have the same job descriptions and equivalent education and experience.
According to the professors research already supported the idea that men’s attitudes toward women and gender equality is influenced by the gender of their children. And so they focused on attitudes of male CEO’s before and after that executive had a daughter.
They found that a short time after male CEO’s had daughters, women’s wages rose relative to men’s shrinking the gender wage gap at their firms. The birth of a son had no effect on the wage gap. First born daughters who were the first born children of a CEO had a bigger effect than subsequent daughters, decreasing the gap by almost three percent. First daughters who were not first children had a less dramatic, but still significant effect about 0.8%.
The effects were strongest at firms with 50 or fewer employees, which they attribute to the fact that CEO’s at smaller firms are typically more involved in making pay decisions than CEO’s at larger firms. And the effects were even stronger for employees with more education.
While the researchers did not directly observe the CEO’s, the research design does point to a causal relationship between the gender of the male CEO’s children and the gender wage gap at his firm. “There is something about a female child,” says Dr. Ross “that makes these issues more salient to male CEO’s.
Tags: CEO, employee attitudes, employee compensation, executives, gender wage gap, new fathers
