Our IWD Research makes waves

Amanda Gosling’s research on the gender pay gap or more specifically ‘The Motherhood Penalty’ got men talking.

Dr Amanda Gosling’s work on women’s barriers to career progression was featured in the Guardian on International Women’s Day. She argued that the pay gap between mothers and fathers in the UK, who have gone on to further education post school, has increased since the late 1970s.

‘Barriers to career progression for mothers with some post-school education have hardly shifted,” she said. “The gap in pay between mothers and fathers looks very similar now as it did in the late 1970s. The story for Gen-Xers is the same for boomers and the millennials.’

Her work, which splices microdata from the Family Expenditure Survey (1978-1999) and the Family Resources Survey (2000-2021), gave a fuller explanation of the extent of the “motherhood penalty”.

Lord Monk referenced Gosling’s findings in the House of Lords later that week and the conversation kept going, less sympathetically by Simon Evans, Scott Capurro and Roger Monkhouse on GB News proving exactly why we need International Women’s Day!  Luckily, economists have the receipts!

Read the full piece in The Guardian here.