Despite rapid changes in women’s educational attainment and continuous labor force experience, convergence in the gender gap in wages slowed in the 1990s and stalled in the 2000s. Using CPS data from 1979 to 2009, we show that convergence in the gender gap in hourly pay over these three decades was attenuated by the increasing prevalence of “overwork” (defined as working 50 or more hours per week) and the rising hourly wage returns to overwork. Because a greater proportion of men engage in overwork, these changes raised men’s wages relative to women’s and exacerbated the gender wage gap by an estimated 10 percent of the total wage gap. This overwork effect was sufficiently large to offset the wage-equalizing effects of the narrowing gender gap in educational attainment and other forms of human capital. The overwork effect on trends in the gender gap in wages was most pronounced in professional and managerial occupations, where long work hours are especially common and the norm of overwork is deeply embedded in organizational practices and occupational cultures. These results illustrate how new ways of organizing work can perpetuate old forms of gender inequality.

Over the past three decades, many indicators of gender inequality have shown signs of slowing or even stalled convergence: women’s labor force participation has leveled off (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2012), the integration of occupations has slowed (Hegewisch et al. 2010), and egalitarian gender attitudes are no more prevalent now than they were in the mid-1990s (Blau, Brinton, and Grusky 2006; Cotter, Hermsen, and Vanneman 2011). Perhaps no indicator has received as much attention as the gender gap in wages, which, after declining rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s, narrowed only modestly in the 1990s and remained stable through the mid-2000s (Blau 2012; Blau and Kahn 2006; England 2010). These observed trends belied empirical predictions based on late-twentieth-century data (e.g., Shannon and Kidd 2003) and led to a reframing of scholarly debates, from whether women were “destined for equality” (e.g., Jackson 1998) to why the gender revolution stalled (e.g., England 2010).

The stalled convergence in the gender gap in wages is especially puzzling in light of the many social, demographic, and economic changes that, all else being equal, should have attenuated gender inequality in labor market outcomes: the convergence, and for recent birth cohorts reversal, of the gender gap in college completion; the decline and delay in women’s fertility; the convergence in men’s and women’s continuous labor force experience; the decline of manufacturing and other relatively high-paying jobs in traditionally male sectors; and the weakening of male-dominated unions (Blau and Kahn 2006; DiPrete and Buchmann 2013; Goldin, Katz, and Kuziemko 2006). Prior efforts to understand this puzzle have focused on the “stalled revolution” in the domestic division of labor (Hochschild and Machung [1989] 2003; see also Bianchi et al. 2012; Geist and Cohen 2011); the uneven or incomplete adoption of effective anti-discrimination, diversity, and family-friendly personnel policies (e.g.,Dobbin, Kim, and Kalev 2011; Hirsh 2009; Kelly 2010; Williams, Blair-Loy, and Berdahl 2013); deep-rooted cultural beliefs about gender differences in competencies that affect labor supply and demand in high-paying occupations and that often become embodied in organizations (e.g., Acker 1990; Ridgeway 2011); and persistent gender segregation in the workplace (e.g., Charles and Grusky 2004; Weeden and Sørensen 2004).

We build on these general lines of inquiry but shift attention to a more proximate factor affecting trends in the gender gap in wages: changes in the social organization of work, specifically the increasing prevalence of long work hours (“overwork,” defined as 50 or more hours per week) and the growth of relative wages associated with overwork. These changes have occurred against a backdrop of persistent and largely stable differences in the proportion of men and women who are willing or able to put in long hours at work. This stability in the gender gap in overwork, when coupled with the rising payoff of overwork, had the net effect of raising men’s wages relative to women’s, thereby slowing the convergence in the gender wage gap. Moreover, because occupations differ in the extent to which overwork is embedded in their cultures, identities, and work practices, the impact of changes in overwork on trends in the gender gap in earnings varied substantially across occupations. We argue that the relative prevalence of overwork in professional and managerial occupations, and the astonishing growth in the wage returns to overwork in these occupations, can help us understand the essentially constant gender gap in these occupations over the past 20 years.

We assess the relationship between trends in overwork and trends in the gender wage gap using Current Population Survey (CPS) data from 1979 to 2009, supplemented by data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). Our analyses feature a graphical description of trends and formal wage decompositions. These decompositions allow us to tease apart the effects of changes in overwork from the effects of changes in standard covariates of wages, and changes in men’s and women’s distribution across high- and low-paying occupations. More importantly, they allow us to understand the structural source of the overwork effect, in particular whether it stems from changes in the gender gap in overwork, changes in the relative wages associated with overwork, or both. We first offer these analyses for the labor market as a whole, examining both gross and within-occupation effects. We then examine how changes in overwork affected trends in professional and managerial occupations compared to other occupations.

Occupational Heterogeneity in Overwork In this section, we argue that the overwork effect differs substantially across occupations, and such heterogeneity can also help us understand cross-occupational differences in trends in the gender gap in wages. As we will demonstrate, the slowdown in the convergence of men’s and women’s wages was especially pronounced in professional and managerial occupations. These occupations are precisely those in which convergence in men’s and women’s educational attainment and continuous labor force experience should, in theory, generate an especially sharp decline in the gender wage gap. One answer to this puzzle, we argue, is the counteracting effects of overwork. Professional and managerial occupations have long been understood to be “greedy” occupations that “seek exclusive and undivided loyalty” from members, including in work hours (Coser 1974:4; see also Epstein et al. 1999; Jacobs and Gerson 2004). To the extent that norms of the ideal worker are especially embedded in professional and managerial identities and organizational practices, we might also anticipate the greatest conflicts with middle-class norms of “intensive mothering” (Hays 1998; Lareau 2003). Professional and managerial women are also especially likely to have overworking spouses, whose limited contributions to non-work responsibilities restrict women’s availability for overwork (Cha 2010). It should thus come as little surprise that the gender gap in overwork is especially pronounced in these occupations and shows little sign of convergence over the period of our data (see also Jacobs and Gerson 2004). Should we likewise anticipate (1) a higher wage premium to overwork in professional and managerial occupations than in other types of occupations and (2) a sharper increase in these wage premiums? The answer to the first question is, we think, unclear. On the one hand, there is no guarantee that long work hours in greedy occupations will necessarily result in an hourly wage premium. Because professionals and managers are typically salaried, people who work long hours out of loyalty to their occupation or organization, professional identity, or other forms of intrinsic motivation could very well earn lower hourly pay than professionals and managers who “merely” work full-time at the same salary (if employers do not adjust overworkers’ salaries to compensate for the extra time) or, at best, equivalent hourly wages (if employers adjust overworkers’ salaries to compensate for their time, but no more). On the other hand, professional and managerial tasks are typically unstandardized and often carried out in teams, making individual productivity and contributions to organizational profits especially difficult to detect, and the costs of monitoring employees to reduce shirking are especially high. In this context, employers are more likely to use work hours as a signal of productivity (Landers et al. 1996; Sharone 2004). If overworking employees are disproportionately rewarded through better work assignments and more frequent promotions (Biggart and O’Brien 2010; Blair-Loy 2003; Epstein et al. 1999; Landers et al. 1996), this will lead to disproportionately higher relative wage returns to overwork in professional and managerial occupations than in other types of occupations. Even if the valence of the overwork wage premium at baseline is unclear, we think there is reason to anticipate that trends in the wage payoff to overwork are more extreme in professional and managerial occupations. The emergence of “winner-take-all” labor markets (Frank and Cook 1995) and tournament models of compensation has been most pronounced in professional and managerial occupations, thereby increasing the potential rewards to acquiring “superstar” status within firms and raising incentives for the most productive workers to work long hours. Similarly, global competition and labor market restructuring, which put pressure on employers to have a flexible labor force, may have encouraged a more stratified labor market even in the same occupations, in which a core group of professionals and managers work ever longer hours and secure ever higher pay, and peripheral or contract employees (e.g., freelance accountants or legal consultants from a staffing company) work in temporary or fixed-term contracts (Kalleberg 2011). This, too, would raise the wages of overworkers relative to full-time workers, creating an upward trend in wage returns to overwork. The upshot is that the diffusion of overwork and its effects on the gender gap in wages will, we think, be especially pronounced in professional and managerial occupations relative to other types of occupations. In these occupations, overwork is more prevalent, the gender gap in overwork especially large, and the increase in wage returns to overwork especially steep.

Conclusions This article documents a strong empirical relationship between trends in overwork and trends in the gender gap in wages. The shift toward long work hours exacerbated the gender gap in wages, partially offsetting wage-equalizing trends in men’s and women’s educational attainment and labor force experience. Between 1979 and 2007, the growing prevalence of overwork exacerbated the gender wage gap by about 10 percent of the total wage gap, a magnitude comparable to the inequality-reducing effect of the convergence in the gender gap in education and rising returns to a college degree in our CPS data.12 For all the attention devoted to education and labor market experience in the gender inequality literature, our findings show that growing work hours and compensation of overwork is equally important to understanding trends in the gender wage gap. The main source of this overwork effect on the gender gap in wages did not stem from changes in the gender gap in overwork. This gap remained essentially constant over the data period. Rather, it was driven by an increase in wage returns to overwork relative to full-time work, an increase that in some occupations meant a change between a wage penalty (i.e., negative wage returns) for overwork in the 1980s to a wage premium by the 1990s. The takeoff in the hourly wages associated with long work hours was sufficient to exacerbate the gender gap in wages by an estimated 9.4 percent of the total change between 1979 and 2007. Trends in overwork and their effect on the gender gap in wages are especially consequential for understanding the especially slow change in the gender wage gap in managerial occupations and the slight increase in the gender wage gap in the professions since the early 1990s. This stagnation is especially puzzling because these occupations are most likely to require a college degree, meaning that the rapid convergence, and for younger cohorts reversal, of the gender gap in college degree attainment should have led to unusually rapid wage convergence in these occupations. We show that this puzzle is in large part due to the effect of overwork in these occupations, where levels of overwork are high, the gender gap in overwork large, and the growth in net wage returns to overwork dramatic. Indeed, if hourly wage returns to overwork had remained constant between 1979 and 2007 (but effects of other factors remained as observed) the wage gap would have narrowed by an additional 30 percent among professionals and 20 percent among managers, compared to 9 percent in other occupations. We also show that price changes of overwork are especially important in understanding gender wage gap trends in the 1980s and 1990s. In these two decades, which were characterized by a dramatic increase in the prevalence of overwork, the magnitude of the overwork price effect was between 10 and 18 percent of the total change in the gender gap in wages for each period (see Table 3). As important as these findings are for establishing an overwork effect on the gender gap in wages, we readily concede that our findings do not explain why convergence in the gender gap in wages all but stalled in the 2000s. During this period, overwork began to decline, and its contribution to trends in the gender wage gap likewise diminished. Why, then, did the gender gap in wages stall in the 2000s? Our results provide some clues, although no complete answers. None of the observed covariates in the CPS do much to explain the stagnation in the gender wage gap in the 2000s, nor do the additional covariates (actual experience, job tenure, and unionization) in the SIPP data. Instead, this stall seems largely due to the reduced pace of integration of occupations (see Table 3). A second clue emerges from a supplementary analysis of the data from the 2000s (not shown), which continue to show a positive price effect of overwork for parents but not for other workers. This finding is, we think, consistent with the argument that “egalitarian essentialism”—an ideology that emphasizes equal rights but is combined with gender essentialist beliefs about intensive mothering (Charles and Grusky 2004; Cotter et al. 2011; Hays 1998)—now prevails. In the context of rising relative wages for overwork, gender essentialism about caregiving may exacerbate the motherhood penalty in wages and stagnate the gender wage gap trend by limiting mothers’ ability to benefit from these rising prices.13 Our results also highlight the importance of a broader question for students of labor markets: Why did the hourly wages for overwork increase so spectacularly? Does this increase in the payoff for overwork reflect a change in organizational compensation practices and occupational norms about work hours, or “merely” rising productivity differences between those who overwork and those who do not? Three empirical patterns in our data suggest the trend is not driven solely by productivity changes: (1) hourly wage returns to overwork were lower than those of full-time work for professionals (in all years) and managers (during the 1980s); (2) the increase in wage returns to overwork was steepest in professional and managerial occupations, where overwork is especially prevalent; and (3) the steepest growth in wage returns to overwork occurred in the occupation decile groups with the highest proportion of overworkers (see Figure S7 in the online supplement). If wage premiums or rising wage returns for overwork solely reflect marginal productivity, one would not anticipate negative wage returns to overwork in the professional and managerial occupations at baseline, nor that trends in wage returns to overwork map onto the prevalence of overwork. These patterns are anticipated, however, if rising returns to overwork reflect rising expectations that workers in already-greedy occupations will put in long hours, and that compensation systems penalize workers who fail to meet these expectations and reward those who win the work hours game (see, e.g., Epstein et al. 1999; Landers et al. 1996). Neither the diffusion of overwork nor changes in the relative pay of overwork took place in a vacuum. Instead, these are part of a broader constellation of changes in the social organization of work driven by macroeconomic shifts. Increased domestic and international competition has introduced new ways of organizing work as employers lay off large numbers of employees to downsize their labor force while expecting higher productivity from the survivors (Bluestone and Rose 1997; Kalleberg 2011). Global markets, and the new technologies that make them possible, have created a 24/7 economy and increased the demand for employees who can be on call any time, any day (Presser 2005). These changes have increased work hours, at least for some workers, and also ratcheted up expectations surrounding what it means to be an ideal worker. Many of these changes in the social organization of work, including expectations surrounding work hours, appear at first glance to be gender neutral. Employers do not specify separate work hour expectations for their male and female employees, nor do they systematically reward men who overwork more than women who overwork, relative to their full-time counterparts. Nevertheless, overwork rests on a social foundation that is itself highly gendered: employees who work long hours can only do so with the support of other household members, usually women, who shoulder the lion’s share of unpaid-work obligations (Acker 1990; Hochschild [1989] 2003; Lips 2013; Ridgeway 2011). Under this system, women are less likely than men to be able to work long hours or to enjoy the rising wage payoff to long hours. The emergence of long work hours as part of the “new normal” in some occupations, the professions and management in particular, builds on and perpetuates old forms of gender inequality.

Appendix Table A1. Means and Standard Deviations of Variables, All CPS Years View larger version Table A2. Decomposition of Trends in the Gender Wage Gap, 1996 to 2004: SIPP and CPS View larger version

Acknowledgements We thank Stephen Benard, Shelley Correll, Paula England, Elizabeth Hirsh, Jennifer C. Lee, Stephen L. Morgan, the ASR reviewers, and the participants of the Political, Economy, and Culture Workshop at Indiana University, the Emerging Scholars Conference at Cornell University, and the Center for the Study of Wealth and Inequality at Columbia University for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Funding

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (SES-0824682), the Center for the Study of Inequality at Cornell University, and the Institute for the Social Sciences at Cornell University.

Notes 1.

The imputation method the BLS uses in the edited series to assign earnings to missing data can bias downward the estimated effects of variables that are excluded from the imputation equations or “hot deck” cell definitions (e.g., detailed occupation). This “match bias” is likely increasing over time as the percentage of cases with missing earnings grows (Heckman and LaFontaine 2004; Hirsch and Schumacher 2004). Given our goal, however, the edited earnings series is appropriate. 2.

We also estimated JMP models using wage equations based on (1) price effects for women and (2) price effects for pooled data. These analyses (available from the first author) yield estimates of our core variables that do not differ appreciably from those presented here. 3.

Standard errors for decomposition terms are not typically reported in the JMP decomposition. Instead, the significance of the effects is tested for the regression coefficients of the wage equation (see Tables S1, S2, S3, and S4 in the online supplement [http://asr.sagepub.com/supplemental]). 4.

Among overworkers, men worked an average of 55.8 hours per week (sd = 8.4) and women an average of 54.8 hours per week (sd = 8.1) (see Table S5 and Figures S1 and S2 in the online supplement). 5.

In additional analyses (not shown) we further differentiated the “other” occupation group into component major occupations (e.g., craft, clerical). The cross-group differences in trends are modest and tangential to this article. 6.

In theory, we could backcode to the detailed occupation level and examine trends at this level. However, aside from the noise that backcoding inevitably introduces, most occupations contain too few cases in a given year or cluster of years to generate robust estimates. Professional and managerial occupations contain the majority (68 percent) of workers whose occupations fall at or above the 75th percentile in the prevalence of overwork. 7.

If we include parental status in our JMP decomposition models, we would in effect be assuming the price effect of motherhood is positive, and that an increase in the proportion of mothers in the labor pool would narrow the gender wage gap. Neither assumption is tenable. We therefore omit marital and parental status in our wage regression models, allowing overwork to be endogenous to these variables. This means our overwork estimates are likely to capture any overwork-wage association driven by gender-differentiated caregiving responsibilities. A separate analysis of data from 1984, when parental status is first available in the MORG, to 2007 shows that changes in the price of overwork had a greater effect on the gender wage gap among parents than among childless workers, and that composition effects slightly narrowed the gender gap in wages among parents. 8.

Union membership is first available in the 1983 MORG data. A supplementary analysis of 1983 to 2007 data shows that the decline of unionization narrowed the gender wage gap but did not appreciably alter the overwork effect: the coefficient of the overwork price effect declines from .018 to .016, and the coefficient for the composition effect remains the same (see Table S7 in the online supplement). 9.

SIPP panels prior to the 1996 panel are not entirely comparable with later panels. 10.

The gender gap in part-time work also decreased over this period, although less sharply than the gender gap in full-time work (result not shown). 11.

The wage penalty for overwork reflects the long work hours of salaried workers, who are not covered by the Fair Labor Standard Act overtime provision. In our supplementary analysis, we re-estimate the overwork effect on weekly earnings for the subset of respondents excluding hourly workers. These results show the wage premium for overwork in all years and yield the substantively same conclusion (see Figure S6 and Table S6 the online supplement). 12.

As we noted earlier, the relative magnitude of the overwork effect is smaller in later years but still substantial enough to offset 38 (SIPP) to 44 (CPS) percent of the education effect (see Table 3 and Table A2). The smaller relative effect of overwork is also due to the larger education effect in later years: the gender gap in education narrowed and reversed especially quickly during the 2000s, further reducing the relative size of the overwork effect. 13.

Budig and Hodges (2010) report that the motherhood wage penalty is smallest in the upper income deciles, where professionals and managers are overrepresented. One might wonder if this is inconsistent with our finding, which shows the greatest inequality-exacerbating effect of overwork on the gender wage gap trends in professional and managerial occupations. Unlike Budig and Hodges (2010), our primary focus is on the relationship between changes in the adjusted price and composition of overwork and changes in the gender gap in wages. Also, the motherhood wage penalty may be generated by many mechanisms (e.g., unobserved human capital, selection into motherhood, or discrimination), not just mothers’ lower representation among overworkers.