The Contribution of Employee-Led and Employer-Led Work Flexibility to the Motherhood Wage Gap

Abstract

We analyze the contribution of job flexibility to the gender wage gap amongst Danish parents with a professional degree. We use a supervised machine learning approach to measure job flexibility from job vacancy text. We distinguish between employee-led and employer-led flexibility. We estimate pooled Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions to analyze the contribution of occupation-level exposure to flexibility to gender wage gaps. We find that employee- and employer-led flexibility contribute in opposite directions to the unexplained component of the motherhood penalty in earnings and wages for those with a professional bachelors degree.