From Gender Equality to Household Earnings Equality: the role of Women’s Labour Market Outcomes across

By disentangling the contribution of the three mechanisms, the key proves to be the gap in employment levels: if the proportion of women who worked was the same as the proportion of men, overall earnings inequality would hypothetically change by -12% on average across countries. [...] Treas (1987) argued that the main driver of the increase in inequality in the US was the increase in the variance of men’s earnings and that, in contrast, the increase in women’s earnings ameliorated between-group inequality. [...] This argument was substantiated by subsequent studies (Cancian, Danziger, and Gottschalk 1993; Cancian and Reed 1999) which showed how the changing earnings patterns of men and women shaped inequality: inequality was increased by the slow growth of the average of men’s earnings and by the rapid growth of their variance, and in contrast decreased by the growth in women’s average earnings and by the. [...] In summary, the literature on the relationship between the three gender gaps and earnings inequality presents both theoretical ambiguity and mixed results, with no study considering the combined and separate impacts of closing the gender gaps in employment, pay, and hours. [...] The assumption in this case is that, were more women to work outside the home they would have the same distribution of earnings and the same distribution of partners and partner’s earnings as women who were, in fact, working and had the same level of education and were of the same age.