The gender pay gap in the UK: children and experience in work

n this study, we document the evolution of the gender pay gap in the UK over the past three
decades and its association with fertility, examining the role of various differences in career patterns
between men and women and how they change with the arrival of the first child. We show that differ-
ences in accumulated years of labour market experience play an important role, while differences in in-
dustry, occupation, and job characteristics explain less, conditional on working experience. We develop
an empirical wage model to estimate the causal effect of working experience on the wages of women.
Estimates from this model are then used to simulate two counterfactual scenarios in which women who
are employed always work full-time, or women’s rates of both part-time and full-time work are the same
as men’s. We find that differences in working experience explain up to two-thirds of the gender pay gap
of college graduates 20 years after the first childbirth, and that the gap is largely driven by differences
in full-time experience. The role of working experience is more moderate for individuals with no college
education, but it can still account for about one-third of the overall long-term gender wage gap.