Decisions taken within the family about how to trade off domestic and paid work were another potential reason we investigated. According to the efficient household allocation theory, women’s paid work is typically given lower priority, as they tend to have lower earnings than their male partners. It would therefore minimise the myanmar rcs data potential loss of household income if it were women who took a step back from employment. If this were true, we would expect the remaining gaps in employment rates to be reduced once accounting for the partner’s job characteristics, but we do not find evidence for this.
Childcare responsibilities
Childcare responsibilities, which typically fall on women, could have been another potential reason. Previous research shows that gender pay gaps open gradually following the birth of the first child and continue to widen for many years after that point. This is because such employment gaps impact on how much employment experience women accumulate and because women tend to switch to part-time work, which is often less well paid per hour.
While school closures during the pandemic added to the domestic responsibilities, we hypothesised that childcare responsibilities could be to blame. However, accounting for the number and age of children within the household, on top of the job characteristics, does not close the remaining gaps, so this also does not appear to be a key factor.