Abstract
The gender wage gap and the penalty of parenthood on wages are still major economic and sociological problems, especially in developing economies. This study aims to fill the void in the literature by analyzing the gender wage gap among couples and the role of parenthood across the unconditional wage distribution in the Turkish labor force. In accordance, 1198 families which include working-married-couples with and without children from the Turkish Household Budget Statistics survey data for 2018 are examined via unconditional quantile regression and decomposition methods. The findings provide insights into three problems of the labor force gender wage gap among couples, the role of parenthood on wages, and the variation of them across the wage distribution. The findings reveal a gender wage gap among couples and the gap is wider for the lower-paid employees. Lower-paid females face a wider motherhood wage penalty whereas fatherhood is mostly insignificant on the males' wages. However, interestingly, fatherhood becomes a significant wage penalty for the highest-paid males.
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Data Availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the Turkish Statistical Institute but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Information on how to obtain it and reproduce the analysis is available from the corresponding author on request.
Notes
The only available and comparable HBS data is from 2014 to 2018 while we conduct this research. Since in these four years, there were neither political nor policy changes in terms of gender in labor economics in Turkey, we believe that the results would be likely to be similar to the results of 2018.
Another micro data regarding the labor force structure of Turkey conducted by TurkStat is the Labor Force Statistics (LFS) data. However, since LFS data does not provide information on individuals aged below 15, it fails to determine the child/children in the households. Furthermore, while LFS data collect the age information in different ranges starting from 15, HBS data reveal the exact age of the individuals starting from 0. Thus, HBS data enables us to address our research questions and conduct a robustness analysis which we explain in the next sections.
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Ebru Caglayan-Akay and Fulden Komuryakan declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
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Caglayan-Akay, E., Komuryakan, F. Gender Wage Gap Among Couples and the Role of Parenthood Across the Wage Distribution in Turkey. J Fam Econ Iss 45, 21–34 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-023-09901-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-023-09901-3