Even family-friendly Scandinavia has pay gap

Scandinavia is supposed to be a family-friendly paradise. We imagine fathers and mothers spending their children’s early months together at home. Then they enroll them in high-quality, government-subsidized child care, from which they pick them up at the end of the world’s shortest workdays.

But it is not as egalitarian as the fantasy suggests. Despite generous social policies, women who work fulltime there are still paid 15 percent to 20 percent less than men, new research shows — a gender pay gap similar to that in the United States.

The main reason for this pay gap seems to be the same in both places: Children hurt mothers’ careers. This is, in large part, because women spend more time on child-rearing than men do, whether by choice or not.

A series of recent studies shows that in both the United States and Europe, the gender pay gap is much smaller until the first child arrives. Then women’s earnings plummet and their career trajectories slow.

Women who do not have children, by and large, continue to grow their earnings at a similar rate to men.

There are still differences because of discrimination and other factors, but researchers say that motherhood explains a large amount of the gap.

It’s another sign that in modern economies, even countries with the most family-friendly policies haven’t made things equal.

Policies like paid leave, subsidized child care and parttime work options are helpful to mothers. Scandinavia has one of the highest rates of women’s labor force participation in the world, and the share of women working in the United States has fallen behind the share in Europe, which has much more generous policies.

But policy alone would not be enough to overcome gender inequality. It would require changes in behavior — including by men. There is evidence that the gap would shrink if fathers acted more the way mothers do after having children, by spending more time on parenting and the related responsibilities.

“At the very least, men have to take a larger role,” said Francine Blau, an economist at Cornell University. “It does become a distinction in the eyes of employers between potential male and female workers, and it may reinforce traditional gender roles.”