Research On The Impact Of Paid Maternity Leave On The Gender Income Gap

To alleviate the continuous decline of fertility rate and get out of the demographic dilemma,in recent years,the government has made constant adjustments to the fertility policy,and the maternity leave policy has changed contemporaneously.Since 2021,along with the three-child policy,provinces and cities have adopted relevant regulations to extend the maternity leave continuously.In this paper,all the maternity leave discussed is paid maternity leave.The original intention of maternity leave policy is to protect and maintain women’s employment and income,which is a fertility security policy.However,due to the high correlation between maternity leave and fertility,the actual implementation of maternity leave policy on women’s employment and income will inevitably be affected by the punishment effect of fertility,and its real effect in the market is not clear.On the one hand,the maternity leave policy plays its role in ensuring fertility.The establishment of maternity leave can prevent women from having to change their jobs due to childbirth,maintain women’s human capital accumulation in the work unit,thus ensuring income and alleviating wage punishment.Appropriate length of maternity leave is also conducive to women’s health,and health as human capital also has a positive effect on women’s future work promotion.On the other hand,the maternity leave policy may further worsen the situation of women.Maternity leave itself cannot directly avoid the temporary interruption of work caused by childbirth.Prolonged maternity leave further increases the time of temporary leave from the labor market.The employment of women will further increase the potential cost of enterprises.The intensification of statistical discrimination and the segregation of gender and employment caused by adverse selection may aggravate the gender inequality in the labor market.This paper uses the data of the China Household Finance Survey(CHFS)in 2013,2015 and 2017 to synthesize panel data,builds a fixed effect model based on the Mincer wage equation,and adds the logarithm of the number of days of maternity leave stipulated by the policy as the core explanatory variable to compare the effect of the extension of maternity leave on the wage rate of men and women;In order to further explore the effect of policy implementation,the maternity leave reform in 2016 was taken as a quasi-natural experiment and analyzed using the double difference(DID)model;In order to explore the effect of policies in different groups,heterogeneity analysis is carried out;Add the latest data in 2019,and use Oaxaca-Blinder classical mean decomposition to explore the causes of wage differences,and study the discrimination mechanism of policy on wage differences.This paper draws the following conclusions: First,on the whole,the length of maternity leave has a negative effect on the wage rate.The logarithmic wage rate will decrease by 0.225 for each unit of increase in the number of days of maternity leave.In the short term after the implementation of the policy,the maternity leave has a more prominent role in maternity security.At this time,the effect of maternity leave on the wage rate is positive.In the sex-specific regression results,the negative effect of maternity leave on women’s wage rate is higher than that of men,which makes the gender wage difference expand.Second,the result of the double difference model shows that after the implementation of the policy of extending maternity leave,the wage rate of both sexes has been negatively affected,and the absolute value of the policy effect on the wage rate of women is higher than that of men,and the gender wage difference has expanded.Thirdly,the heterogeneity analysis shows that the negative effect of maternity leave policy on wage rate is more significant when the degree of marketization of the sample’s permanent residence area is higher;The nature of the work of the sample is non-public sector,that is,when the sample comes from private enterprises,the negative effect of maternity leave policy on the wage rate is more significant.When the sample comes from state-owned or collective enterprises,the negative effect is significantly lower,but the absolute value is higher,which may be because such work units have to face market competition and cannot adjust flexibly like private enterprises;When the sample is married,the negative effect of the maternity leave policy on the wage rate is more significant,the absolute value of the policy effect on women is higher than that of men,and the gender wage difference expands.Fourth,the decomposition result of wage difference shows that after the extension of maternity leave,the absolute value and proportion of the unexplainable part of the gender wage difference caused by discrimination have increased,the endowment difference contribution of the explanatory variable maternity leave length is negative,and the coefficient difference contribution is high,indicating that the extension of maternity leave reduces the wage difference by improving the human capital difference,but the expansion of the increased discrimination on the wage difference has offset this security effect,In the wage difference between the experimental group and the control group,due to the increase of discrimination against the experimental group,the proportion of discrimination in the wage difference between the two groups decreased significantly,which verified the discrimination mechanism of maternity leave extension.The possible innovations include: First,existing research focuses more on the birth policy itself,and this article separately selects the policy reform of extending maternity leave,providing empirical results for analyzing its labor market effects;Second,based on the regression results of PSM+DID,this article uses the classical wage decomposition method to provide empirical support for the discrimination mechanism of maternity leave extension on gender wage differences;Third,this article found that in the contribution to gender wage differences,the length of maternity leave has a negative contribution to individual endowment differences,while a higher positive contribution to discrimination differences.