Class Differences in Establishment Pathways to Fatherhood Wage Premiums

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12475
• Author: Lynn Prince Cooke,Sylvia Fuller
• Published date: 01 June 2018
• Date: 01 June 2018

L P C University of Bath

S F University of British Columbia∗

Class Differences in Establishment Pathways

to Fatherhood Wage Premiums

Organizations have been argued to favor fathers

over childless men and skilled fathers over

less-skilled fathers, but group wage inequalities

vary across as well as within establishments.

This article theorizes class differences in the

contribution of being employed in a high-wage

rm to the fatherhood wage premium. Analyses

of linked employer–employee data from the

Canadian Workplace and Employee Survey

reveal that sorting into high-wage establish-

ments accounts for 60% of the economy-wide

premium for less-educated and nonprofessional

fathers, whereas high-skilled fathers tend to

work in lower wage establishments but receive

the largest net fatherhood premium within rms.

Among the subsample of fathers who changed

employers in the past 5 years, less-skilled fathers

fared worse, whereas high-skilled fathers sorted

into high-wage rms. Results thus suggest that

employment in a higher wage rm likely enables

less-skilled men to transition to fatherhood,

whereas high-wage employers may discrim-

inate in favor of only high-skilled fathers

in hiring.

Department of Social & Policy Sciences, Claverton Downs,

University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK

(l.p.cooke@bath.ac.uk).

∗Department of Sociology, Universityof British Columbia,

6303 NW Marine Drive, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6T

1Z1, Canada.

Key Words: Canadian families, fatherhood, income or

wages, paternal employment.

Parenthood widens gender economic inequali-

ties, with fatherhood predicting a wage premium

that contrasts with the wage penalty for mother-

hood (Lundberg & Rose, 2000). Not all fathers

benet equally, though, as the magnitude of

the North American net fatherhood wage pre-

mium can vary across groups (Glauber, 2008;

Hodges & Budig, 2010; Killewald, 2013; Waite

& Denier, 2015). One structural argument for

group differences in the premium is that they

legitimate between- and within-gender hierar-

chies of bureaucratic organizations (Hodges &

Budig, 2010), but wages vary as much across as

within establishments (Groshen, 1991; Lazear

& Shaw, 2008). Consequently, how workers

sort into low- or high-wage establishments

can account for some of the economy-wide

group wage inequalities (Fuller, 2017; Javdani,

2015; Pendakur & Woodcock, 2010). In this

article, we theorize and test educational and

occupational differences in the contribution

of establishment sorting to fatherhood wage

premiums.

Very little is known about the role of estab-

lishment sorting and fatherhood wage premiums

because of the limited availability of repre-

sentative matched employee–employer data

(Tomaskovic-Devey & Avent-Holt, 2016).

Through the 1990s, Europe was ahead of North

America in the needed data (Abowd & Kra-

marz, 1999). Analysis of one such Norwegian

administrative data set found that white-collar

fathers were actually located in lower paying

establishments than their childless counterparts;

Journal of Marriage and Family 80 (June 2018): 737–751 737

DOI:10.1111/jomf.12475