Housework And Gender Pay Gap

Since the founding of New China,the implement of the basic state policy of gender equality increased the proportion of female non-farm employed population significantly and enhanced women’s education level greatly,but the gender pay gap has not narrowed but expanded.Domestic scholars generally try to find the causes of gender pay gap through the labor market,little concerned about the potential impact of the private sector such as family on the gender pay gap.However the research experience of western countries shows that the burdens of housework have a negative impact on women’s labor income and is the main reason of gender pay gap.So the dissertation tries to connect the research of household division of housework with gender stratification,analyses the reason of gender pay gap from the perspective of housework,and discusses the social consequence of housework burden.The dissertation bases on a series of "housework-labor income" theories such as allocation of energy or effort theory,perspective of the timing and flexibility of housework,theory of market signaling and perspective of compensating wage differential.According research purpose,the dissertation limits the research object on 18-64 years old married workforces engaged in non-agricultural labor.Using the data of the third wave survey on the social status of women in China in 2010 and based on the results of ordinary least square regressions and unconditional quintiles regressions,the research analyzes the effect of domestic work on labor income,and discusses the gender difference of the impact of housework on labor income among different groups such as groups in different family life cycles and groups in different labor market sectors.The dissertation tries to measure the influence of domestic work,human capital,occupational gender segregation and sex discrimination to gender pay gap according to the decomposing results of Neumark decomposition and FFL decomposition.The dissertation includes four sections.The first section mainly demonstrates topics.In this section,the background,the theoretical value and realistic value of research are referred.And the defects of previous similar researches are also involved,from which the research object,research contents and the structure of dissertation are drawn.The second section is about literature review and research design.The literature review discusses the theories and research results of domestic work and gender pay gap,clears the concept of housework and labor income in married labors,and sums up the influence mechanism and function route of housework to the labor income.The third chapter also establishes explanatory framework,proposes hypothesis,introduces operationalization of key variables,and reports data source and research methods.As the main body of dissertation,the third section is mainly carried out empirical analysis.This part describes the feature of gender difference in domestic work and gender pay gap,analyzes that how housework affects the labor income of married workforces,evaluates the effect of domestic work on labor income in different family life cycles and different labor market sectors,and discusses in which family life cycle or labor market sector the effect of housework to gender pay gap is highest.The data shows that the gender differentiation of housework in different groups has differentiated characters.The gender pay gap of married workforce is chartered as glass ceiling effect and middle effect.The gender pay gap is mainly arisen from the income differences of male and female in middle and upper-income groups.The impact of housework to labor income is negative and threshold effect.The effect of housework to income differed by the amount of time spent per day on housework.The effect of housework on the market income is different in different income classes.The negative effect impact decreased with the increase in income.Housework penalty is more serious in middle and upper-income group than other groups.The impact of some housework variables varies with different gender.In terms of average income,the gender pay gap of married work forces is mainly arisen from endowment effect,and the gender difference of housework is the main reason of gender pay gap.Housework influences the gender pay gap more by way of sex discrimination.In different income levels,the gender pay gap of mid-and-low income group mainly arisen from composition effect.But with the improvement of income levels,sex discrimination of market contributes more influence to the gender pay gap.Discrimination caused by housework becomes the main source of gender discrimination.In married workforce labors,the degree of housework’ penalty varied across the family life cycle.With the growth of children,the power of endowment part increases with the declining of the power of residual part.Housework and human capital both have attribute to the gender pay gap greatly from the low-income group to high-income group in every stage of family life cycle.The penalty of housework and the effect of housework to gender pay gap in informal labor market sector are higher than formal labor market sectors.In economic sector,the impact of housework has significant gender difference.The forth section is about the systematical summing of full dissertation.Conclusions are drawn and limitation of research is summarized in last chapter.On the basic of research conclusions,this part also points out the difference of conclusion between this dissertation and foreign similar researches,discusses the influence of the universal two-child policy to married female labors,and gives some research directions in the future.