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Title: Overqualified and Underpaid: Understanding the Mechanisms Producing the Earnings Penalty for Care Workers
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Budig, Michelle Jean Hodges, Melissa J. |
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Overqualified and Underpaid: Understanding the Mechanisms Producing the Earnings Penalty for Care Workers Presented: Denver CO, American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, August 2012 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: American Sociological Association Keyword(s): Human Capital; Job Characteristics; Occupational Choice; Occupations; Wage Penalty/Career Penalty Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. The care wage penalty is well established, but less is known about the mechanisms producing it. Commonly used arguments of these mechanisms have not been systematically adjudicated empirically. We examine the differences between care and non-care workers that may produce this penalty, including differences in selection into care work on stable individual characteristics (such as tastes, preferences, and unmeasured abilities), human capital, job amenities and disamenities, occupational and industrial segregation, and participation in the public sector and worker unions. We also consider how specific types of care workers, such as doctors, teachers, and childcare workers, experience different penalties for performing care work. Importantly, we go beyond simply considering how differences in worker and job characteristics may lead to the care penalty. The care penalty may be produced if the wage returns to human capital, or the wage protection effects of worker unions and government subsidized work, are less positive, or more negative, for care workers. We investigate this by testing whether returns (i.e., coefficients) are different between care and non-care workers in regard to human capital (education, experience, and seniority) and potentially protective job characteristics (working in the public sector and membership in a collective bargaining unit). In these analyses we again divide care workers into subgroups of workers to consider which care workers face greater wage penalties and whether human capital investments and protective job characteristics benefit some care workers more than others. |
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Bibliography Citation
Budig, Michelle Jean and Melissa J. Hodges. "Overqualified and Underpaid: Understanding the Mechanisms Producing the Earnings Penalty for Care Workers." Presented: Denver CO, American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, August 2012. |