Gender and Wage & Hour Violations

    Women tend to suffer significantly more wage and hour law violations than men. That's a conclusion of a recent paper: Miruna Petrescu-Prahova and Michael W. Spiller, "Women’s Wage Theft: Explaining Gender Differences in Violations of Wage and Hour Laws", Work and Occupations (published online July 2016). Here's the abstract:

In this study, the authors identify and analyze a distinct and understudied source of gender inequality: gender differences in violations of wage-related workplace laws. The authors find that women have significantly higher rates of minimum wage and overtime violations than men and also lose more of their earnings to wage theft than men. In the case of minimum wage violations, the authors also find that nativity and immigration status strongly mediate this gender difference. Multivariate analysis suggests that demand-side characteristics—occupation and measures of nonstandard work and informality—account for more of the gender difference in minimum wage violations than do worker characteristics.

In particular, the authors find "no significant gender difference in minimum wage violations among U.S.-born workers; the gender gap is concentrated among immigrants, especially those who are undocumented." (p. 21). The study's findings are based on the 2008 Unregulated Worker Survey, a representative survey of 4,387 frontline workers (that is, not manager, professional or technical workers) in low-wage industries and occupations in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City.

 

---Sachin Pandya