Federal Reserve Notes: Gender Gaps in the Labor Market Widen Every Summer Contributing to Gender Disparities in Promotions and Pay

Gender Gaps in the Labor Market Widen Every Summer

Brendan M. Price and Melanie Wasserman1

Introduction

Gender gaps in labor market activity are pervasive, longstanding, and a regular subject of policy debates. Relative to men, women tend to work fewer hours per week, more conventional hours, and fewer years over the course of their lives.2These differences in the intensity and timing of work contribute to gender disparities in promotions and pay.3 But despite decades of research on this topic, little attention has been paid to the timing of work throughout the year. To motivate our inquiry, Figure 1 plots the monthly labor force participation rates of prime-age US women and men using non–seasonally adjusted data, with June, July, and August shaded gray. Summer after summer, women’s labor force participation drops sharply while men’s participation does not.

Figure 1. The summer drop in prime-age female labor force participation

Note: Non–seasonally adjusted labor force participation rates among individuals aged 25–54, normalized to zero in December 2019. Shaded regions correspond to the months of June, July, and August.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Labor Force Statistics.

Accessible version

In this Note, we summarize some of the key findings from our research paper “The Summer Drop in Female Employment”, available at SSRN (https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4352186). First, we document that women’s employment and hours worked fall consistently during the summer months. Next, we show that school closures for summer break — and consequent lapses in school-provided childcare—are the root cause of these declines. We then explain how women’s lower employment rate over the summer reflects both sectoral sorting and gender disparities among workers in similar job types. Lastly, we discuss ramifications for the gender gap in pay.