Dads and the Gender Pay Gap

If you grew up before the days of streaming entertainment, you know that summers are for re-runs. In that spirit, and since my last week had very little writing time between summer camps, VBS, dentist appointments, and the first day of summer classes, this week I am re-running a piece I wrote in June 2018. I have updated to include the most recent available data.

One of the classes I regularly teach is a research methods course in which I teach students how to find or collect and analyze data. In one of their assignments in the course, students have to use the U.S. Census Bureau website to look up and report data on Glynn County. Then, I ask them what most surprised them about what they found. Every semester, most of them are most surprised by the wage gap between men and women with comparable levels of education in Glynn County.

According to the 2024 American Community Survey (ACS), within the population of adults age 25 and over who have earnings, women’s median earnings are approximately $16,000 less than men’s. Much of this gap may be explained by differences in education, so the ACS breaks the population out by educational attainment. The estimated median earnings gap, approximated in parentheses in the following list, persists for those with less than a high school degree ($4600), high school diploma ($8800), some college ($29,000), bachelor’s degree ($24,800), and graduate or professional degree ($23,500).

These gaps are astounding, and they always tend to shock and anger students, with good reason. Wage gaps are complicated statistics and certainly can be partially attributed to non-discriminatory factors. But, gaps this large and within education groups almost surely indicate widespread labor-market sexism.

The good news is that evidence suggests Glynn County is experiencing the same progress as the rest of the country in this regard. On the whole, the gender wage gap in 2024 was smaller than 10 years earlier.

One of the reasons for this narrowing gap is that women are increasingly entering occupations that have historically been male-dominated. And much of the credit for this trend goes to the fathers of those women. In a 2011 publication, economists Judith K. Hellerstein and Melinda Sandler Morrill find that women born in 1977 were 13-20% more likely to enter their dads’ occupations than women born in 1909 and that this increase could be attributed to fathers’ influence and transfer of knowledge and skills to their daughters.

As it has become more acceptable for women to enter male-dominated fields, their fathers have begun to encourage and train them to do so.

I am a product of this type of fatherly encouragement. My dad is an electrical engineer and tried hard to convince at least one of his three daughters to follow in his footsteps, exposing us to his work and hobby as often as we would tolerate when we were kids and teens. He did not succeed with my siblings or me, but he is now working on his grandkids, most of whom are also girls.

Dad didn’t convince me to become an engineer, but through his trying, I did gain the confidence that I could be successful in whatever field I chose.

So, I am an economist. When I graduated in 2015, only 31.7% of new Economics Ph.D.s were women. And when I was hired to my first tenure-track job, 41.2% of people in similar positions were women. Today, I am one of the 36.2% of Associate Professors of Economics at non-doctoral institutions who are women. And my dad couldn’t be prouder.

As we approach Father’s Day, I celebrate those dads, like mine, who encourage and enable their daughters to thrive in whatever occupations they choose, especially those that have historically been dominated by men.

Thanks, Dad. Happy Father’s Day.

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Dr. Melissa Trussell is a professor in the School of Business and Public Management at College of Coastal Georgia who works with the college’s Reg Murphy Center for Economic and Policy Studies. Contact her at mtrussell@ccga.edu. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the College of Coastal Georgia.