What Determines The Gender Pay Gap In Academia?

This paper focuses on two mechanisms that could explain the persistence of the gender pay gap – child penalty and bargaining. We concentrate on academia and use administrative data from the University of Tartu, the largest university in Estonia. The context of the academic sector allows us to control for worker productivity through indicators of research and teaching activities. Administrative data on academic staff from 2012 to 2021 has been linked with the population register and web-scraped data from SCOPUS. We follow the quasi-experimental approach proposed by Kleven et al. (2019a) to identify child penalty and derive outside option wages for all the detailed institutes to estimate the role of bargaining. Despite no penalty in hourly wages, the decrease in the working hours for mothers equals two years of full-time work spread over four years after childbirth. Compared to the penalty for the whole population, the child penalty in academia is shorter-lived, and no statistically significant effect on women's publications or citations was found. Men, in contrast, do not experience any penalties related to children. Women's worse bargaining skills seem to be an important factor behind the gender pay gap in academia, whereas the institute's higher outside option wage is related to relatively higher wages for men and is a less important factor for the wages of women.