Gender roles in family and earnings differences in Brazil

The gender gap in earnings in the Brazilian labor market have been declining steadily for 40 years, but there is a remaining difference which is usually associated with discrimination against women. This paper examines the extent to which familiar characteristics of women and men explain the documented gender gap in earnings in Brazil. The hypothesis is that overcommitment of women with paid work and housework is the fundamental constraint for equity in earnings. I found no maternity or marriage penalty for women. On the other hand, there is a substantial penalty for household work for both men and women, but it is considerably more severe among women, not only because they do four times more hours of housework than men, but also because the negative effect over female earnings is larger. I added the familiar characteristics and the mean number of weekly hours of housework to the conventional model of decomposition of the difference in earnings and it increased the explained component of the difference between women and men.