On average, male federal employees made 7% more than their female colleagues in 2017, the most recent year for which data from OPM was available. Put another way, women in the federal workforce earned 93 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2017. Women made an average of $80,213 that year, while men earned an average of $86,301. That’s better than it was in 1999, when male federal employees made, on average, 19% more than their female colleagues, according to GAO. The pay gap is down, in part, because men and women have become more similar in the workforce in some ways, GAO said. Men and women now have about the same amount of experience in the federal government. Plus, more women have left low-paying clerical positions and entered higher-paying professional and administrative jobs.

Citing: The Pay Gap for Federal Workers Has Continued to Narrow, but Better Quality Data on Promotions Are Needed by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (December 3, 2020)

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Tips are ‘way down’ in restaurants. Sexual harassment is up, a new study shows

The coronavirus has exacerbated the power imbalance between tipped servers and their customers, according to a new study by the nonprofit One Fair Wage, which surveyed 1,675 food service workers in New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C. While tipped workers — 70 percent of whom are women — were always somewhat beholden to their customers, the coronavirus economy has given the customer far more power, leaving servers vulnerable to sexual harassment and health risks, as many customers refuse to respect the restrictions necessary to keep servers safe. Struggling to get by, servers are more reliant on tips than they used to be. Eighty-three percent of workers surveyed say their tips have declined during the coronavirus and almost two-thirds say they’re taking home less than 50 percent what they used to in tips.

Citing: Take off your mask so I know how much to tip you: Service Workers’ Experience of Health & Harassment during COVID-19 by Catharine A. Mackinnon and Louise Fitzgerald at One Fair Wage and the UC Berkeley Food Labor Research Center (December 2020)

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COVID-19 crisis: Fewer women than men feel they can ask for raise

Ginning up the courage to ask for a raise is tough in any labour market, let alone one ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic. But men are exhibiting more moxie than women when it comes to bargaining for better pay during the pandemic. That is the finding of a study released by Moody’s Analytics and Morning Consult that surveyed 5,000 adult workers in mid-September. The study found that overall, 23 percent of workers who are employed said the pandemic has made them less likely to ask for a raise in pay or benefits, compared to 18 percent who described themselves as more willing to do so. But a drill down into the data reveals that the pandemic is widening gender gaps that predate it. Across all major demographic groups, women were far less likely to ask their employer for better compensation or benefits.

Citing: Bargaining Power, COVID-19, and the Essential Economy by John Leer, Dante DeAntonio, Bernard Yaros, Ryan Sweet, Cristian deRitis, and Mark Zandi at Moody’s Analytics and Morning Consult (December 2, 2020)

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Retirement gender gap defies child choice 

The research from the University of Sydney has examined retirement outcomes for single, older women without children. Despite not taking maternity leave, the study found two-thirds of the women had experienced an involuntary career interruption. Instead, they were more likely to have career breaks later in life, during their 50s and 60s, as they took on caring duties for elderly parents. While many participants reported that not having children increased their earnings earlier in their careers, being single meant that they could not benefit from sharing their financial burdens with a partner. The report also made a suite of policy recommendations, including a call for better education for employers on practices under the anti-discrimination legislation. Other suggestions include more affordable housing options.

Citing: Security in old age for older single women without children by Myra Hamilton, Helen Hodgson, Bruce Bradbury, Mary Ip, Elizabeth Adamson and Georgia van Toorn at the University of Sydney (November 2020)

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US Chamber of Commerce Study Says Childcare Situation Due to COVID Is Affecting Employers 

[…]The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, on Nov 19, released a report  "Piecing Together Solutions: Employer Childcare Assistance Now and Looking Ahead," which examines how employers have supported employees with young children while experiencing employee turnover and the future of their investment in childcare. The report shows that, while most employers feel they are aware and supportive of the childcare needs of their employees, they underestimated the number of workers who would leave the workforce due to COVID-19.

Citing: Employer Childcare Assistance Now and Looking Ahead by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation (November 2020)

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New Research Reports

Impact of the COVID-19 Crisis on Family Dynamics in Economically Vulnerable Households 

Washington Center for Equitable Growth | Ariel Kalil, Susan Meyer, and Rohen Shah | December 14, 2020

The COVID-19 crisis will not affect all families equally, but may cause particular harm to children of low-income and less-educated parents and for preschool age children, who are especially sensitive to developmental inputs. This study surveys 572 low income families with preschool-age children in Chicago to understand family dynamics following the economic and social restrictions imposed by the pandemic. The research separately examines the associations between economic hardship, exposure to the virus, and pandemic-induced increases in childcare time on parental mental health and stress, parent-child interaction, and children’s adjustment. The study finds both positive and negative effects: Parental job and income losses are strongly associated with parents’ depressive symptoms, stress, diminished sense of hope, and negative interactions with children. Additionally, parents’ exposure to COVID-19 is associated with less positive parent-child interactions and more child behavior problems.

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Reimagining Workplace Protections: A Policy Agenda to Meet Independent Contractors’ and Temporary Workers’ Needs

Urban Institute | Jenny R. Yang, Molly Weston Williamson, Shelly Steward, Steven Brown, Hilary Greenberg, and Jessica Shakesprere | December 8, 2020

Millions of workers in nonstandard arrangements, including temporary, subcontracted, and on-call workers and independent contractors, lack access to essential workplace protections or, where protections do exist, to adequate enforcement mechanisms. Building an equitable economy requires addressing these shortcomings and reimagining our system of workplace protections. This report provides a policy framework for expanding essential protections to more workers, focusing on the needs of independent contractors and temporary workers. The interrelationships of work structure models highlight the need for broader solutions that combine workplace protections and workplace safety net supports, such as unemployment insurance and paid leave, to work itself and not a particular work arrangement.

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Head Start and Families’ Recovery From Economic Recession: Policy Recommendations for COVID-19

Family Relations | William J. Scarborough, Caitlyn Collins, Leah Ruppanner, and Liana Christin | December 5, 2020

This article examines whether the availability of Head Start during the Great Recession mitigated the impact of this crisis on poverty rates among families with young children. This study used data from the American Community Survey from 2006 through 2016 and state‐level data on Head Start availability from Program Information Reports. The first 2 decades of the 21st century have witnessed two major economic crises: the Great Recession and the COVID‐19 pandemic, and programs such as Head Start that support at‐risk families may mitigate such negative consequences. Findings show that States with higher rates of Head Start enrollment had a smaller increase in family poverty during the Great Recession and a more stable recovery than states with lower Head Start enrollment. These findings suggest that greater access to Head Start programs prevented many families from falling into poverty and helped others exit poverty during the Great Recession.

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Employment and Safety Net Survey, Wave I: Paid Leave and Childcare During the Pandemic

American Enterprise Institute | Angela Rachidi | December 2, 2020

The American Enterprise Institute commissioned a survey of 3,518 working-age adults in late July 2020 to better understand the paid leave landscape available to working families during the COVID-19 pandemic and how the pandemic has shaped childcare needs and arrangements. Survey results suggest that about one in five workers with a job before the pandemic had a household member who took leave from work for their own illness, to care for an ill loved one, or for childcare reasons since the pandemic started. Respondents with a child in the household were much more likely to report household leave-taking than were those without a child. While most leave takers received partial or full pay during their time off, adults from lower-income households were less likely to receive pay.

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Making the Case: Gender-Conscious Programs in Higher Education

National Women’s Law Center | Margaret Hazuka and Adaku Onyeka-Crawford | December 1, 2020

Gender-conscious programs—sometimes called affirmative action—on college campuses are under attack. Groups opposed to gender justice want to end programs that promote gender and racial diversity on campus. They also want to end programs with a focus on gender issues, such as gender studies courses—even though these programs are open to anyone regardless of gender. To counter these attacks, it’s important to know the facts. This report describes when gender-conscious programming is permissible in higher education and why it’s still needed today.

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The Gender Aspect of Immigrants’ Assimilation in Europe

IZA | Tae Hoon Lee, Giovanni Peri, and Martina Viarengo | December 2020

The labor market performance of immigrants relative to natives has been widely studied but its gender dimension has been relatively neglected. Our paper aims at revisiting labor market convergence between immigrants and natives and examining this under-studied dimension in a comprehensive study of the EU-15 countries and Switzerland over the period 1999-2018. […] Our results show that in most countries female migrants start with a larger employment gap but converge more rapidly than male migrants do. We also provide a broad overview of the role of potential factors such as economic conditions, labor markets structure, institutions and attitudes towards immigrants and women and their association with employment convergence of all immigrants and female immigrants specifically. While the analysis provides an interesting insight, we do not identify very significant factors at the national level. We find a very strong correlation between attitudes towards immigrants and their employment convergence across sub-national regions.

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