Wage Penalty of Care Work? An Evaluation using a Continuous measure of Care Provision

• In Event: 582 - Regular Session. For Love and Money: Emotions and Economics in Caring Labor

Abstract

Stimulated by Kilbourne et al. (1994)’s seminal work, research on care work has been boomed in recent two decades. Two major theoretical interests for sociologists and economists are: (1) the extent of wage penalty in care provision and (2) the reason why there is such a penalty. Although studies on the wage differential use advanced statistical techniques to eliminate unobserved heterogeneity (Cohen and Huffman 2003; England, Budig and Folbre 2002; Kilbourne et al. 1994; Tomaskovic‐Devey and Skaggs 2002), care work is still crudely measured: an occupation can be either caring or non-caring. Merging General Social Survey 2012 (GSS 2012) with a newly available data resource on occupations, this paper shows the limitations of a dichotomous measure of care work and the credibility of a continuous measure. In particular, females are more likely to engage in care work regardless of how we measure it, but the continuous measure leads to a finding more consistent with the cultural feminist theory: when two variables are allowed to interact with respondents’ job hierarchy, the results from the two measures contradict with each other. For those who are at the top in job hierarchy, the continuous measure shows that care provision reduces earnings while the dichotomous one shows the opposite.

Author

• Yuk Leong Hung, The Chinese University of Hong Kong