Sixty years ago this week, President Kennedy signed into law the Equal Pay Act of 1963, mandating that women receive the same pay as men engaged in the same work. Although the gender pay gap has narrowed since the law went into effect, women continue to earn significantly less than men.

Unpaid family care for children and older adults, which forces women more than men to reduce their work hours, partially explains this enduring gender gap in earnings. On average, women who have children forfeit 15 percent of their earnings to provide family care, which costs them $295,000 in lost wages and related retirement income over a lifetime. Unless affordable paid child and elder care options become widespread, parity in earnings between women and men will be difficult to achieve.

Understanding the gender pay gap

When the Equal Pay Act was implemented in 1963, women earned only 59 percent as much as men. In the decades since, that gap has shrunk significantly but remains substantial. The US Census Bureau (PDF) estimated that for full-time, year-round workers in 2021, median weekly earnings for women were 84 percent of median weekly earnings for men.

Expanding the scope to all workers, not just those employed full time, Pew researchers estimate that 2022 median hourly earnings for women equaled only 82 percent of the median value for men. That’s about the same as in 2002, meaning virtually no progress in gender wage equality has been made over the past 20 years.

But what has caused this stagnation? Education is not the culprit, as women are generally better educated than men now. For people ages 25 to 64 in 2022, 42 percent of women had at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 36 percent of men. Some researchers have speculated that women may be less aggressive than men in negotiating salary increases, driving the pay gap. And employers can discriminate against women, especially in hiring decisions, which relegates many women to lower-paying jobs.

Women’s caregiving demands also contribute to the gender pay gap. Most women provide essential care to family members, including children and adults who need help. At ages 25 to 44, 65 percent of women live with dependent children or help adult family members or friends with care needs, compared with 47 percent of men. Married mothers spend more time caring for children than married fathers (PDF), regardless of employment status. Women are also more likely than men to care for an aging parent, which can result in more lost work hours.

Evidence suggests some women choose occupations that pay less but provide more flexibility to accommodate their family care responsibilities. For other women, however, caregiving necessitates curtailing their employment or stopping work altogether.

Employment rates for women with young children in particular are low. Only 63 percent of women in opposite-sex married couple families with a child younger than age 6 were employed in 2021, compared with 71 percent of similar mothers with a youngest child ages 6 to 17. Men’s employment rates, by contrast, vary by less than 1 percentage point with the age of their minor children.

The lifetime cost of family care

Women often face significant financial consequences when they reduce their employment to provide unpaid family care. Working less reduces future earnings as well as current income, as time out of the workforce and passed-up promotions reduce earnings growth.

For mothers born between 1981 and 1985, who are now in their late thirties and early forties, we project the employment-related costs of providing unpaid care to children and adult family members with care needs average $295,000 in 2021 inflation-adjusted dollars over a lifetime. Lost earnings account for 80 percent of our total estimate of lifetime employment-related caregiving costs, with the remaining 20 percent of costs resulting from lost retirement income through Social Security and employment-based retirement plans.

Caregiving costs are especially steep among less-educated mothers. Lifetime care-related earnings losses represent 26 percent of potential earnings for mothers who didn’t complete high school, compared with 12 percent for college graduates. Less-educated women tend to have more children than other women and face more barriers to balancing caregiving and employment. Many less-educated workers are employed in jobs that offer little flexibility and don’t earn enough to afford paid child care, which is especially expensive in some parts of the country (PDF).