Geir Høgsnes

From Motherhood Penalties to Husband Premia: The New Challenge for Gender Equality and Family Policy, Lessons from Norway

Given the key role that processes occurring in the family play in creating gender inequality, the family is a central focus of policies aimed at creating greater gender equality. We examine how family status affects the gender wage gap using longitudinal matched employer-employee data from Norway, 1979–96, a period with extensive expansion of family policies. The motherhood penalty dropped dramatically from 1979 to 1996. Among men the premia for marriage and fatherhood remained constant. In 1979, the gender wage gap was primarily due to the motherhood penalty, but by 1996 husband premia were more important than motherhood penalties.

The Male Marital Wage Premium: Sorting Vs. Differential Pay

The authors examine whether male marital and parenthood premia arise due to differential pay by employers or from differential sorting of employees on occupations and establishments. They investigate these premia using matched employee-employer data from the period 1979–96 in Norway, a country with increased pressures on men to be more active in the family sphere and in which public policy has aimed at remaking the family institution. We find that the effect of marriage, and to a lesser extent of children, occurs mostly through sorting on occupations and occupation-establishment units. The role of differential pay from employers is marginal in explaining the marital and parenthood premia. Results assessing within-individual changes in wages suggest that about 80% of the marital premium is due to selection. The men who eventually marry and/or have children sort into the higher-paying occupations and occupation-establishment units even prior to marriage and parenthood.

Wage Bargaining and Norms of Fairness - a Theoretical Framework for Analysing the Norwegian Wage Formation

The focus of this article is on wage formation in Norway in the seventies and eighties Our main question is whether the institutional frames for wage negotiations in Norway are compatible with the new factors and topics which have become increasingly important during the last two decades The new situation is partly due to a more complex structure concerning the character and number of unions taking part in the negotiations But most important is the change in the arguments which are used to legitimate wage claims. None of the traditional economic approaches towards wage bargaining directly take into account the significance of wage comparisons between employees at different plants or among different groups of employees, and here we are at the core of the argument in this article The development during the last years indicates that a theory about what is actually going on in wage negotiations has to take into account the question of wage inequalities and their legitimacy, i e the question of a fair wage distribution The wage level and wage growth for other groups or in other firms today has quite a different impact on the outcome of the negotiations than is assumed in traditional bargaining theory. The significance of norms of fairness is not limited to the study of local bargaining processes With increasing strength the normative perspective also becomes necessary to our understanding of negotiations at the macro level, i.e the central negotiations This seems to be the case especially where, as in Norway, the state authorities play an active role in the negotiations, along with the unions and the employers associations Although the main problems discussed in this article are related to the Norwegian wage formation, the arguments put forward are of a more general type They are assumed to be of importance in relation to the Situation in countries with an institutional structure similar to that in Norway concerning wage bargaining and wage policy