Gender Gap in Paid Sick Leave Access

Paid sick leave provides crucial support for workers who need to stay home to recover from illness or to care for family members. But, despite bearing much of the load on such care work, women hourly workers in the service sector are significantly less likely to have access to paid sick leave than the men they work alongside (2020).

Firms Segregation and Gaps in Work Schedule Quality

Shift researchers (2020) found that workers of color, especially women of color, had significantly more precarious work schedules – things like on-call shifts and limited advance notice. While some of these gaps were explained by occupation and education, we discovered that the segregation of workers of color into the specific firms with the most precarious scheduling practices explained an important part of the gap.

Firm Segregation and the Gender Wage Gap

There is a large gender wage gap in the service sector. Women make about $1.73 per hour less than men, which is equivalent to 14% of the average hourly wage. Just like with racial/ethnic gaps in scheduling, Shift researchers found that the segregation of women into lower-paying firms explained an important part of that gap.  Another way to say that is that hourly wages declined with the percentage of the firm’s workforce who were women, as shown below.

Across all papers addressing inequality at the Shift Project, we find that inequality between groups persists across models. It remains after controlling and adjusting for individual differences, demographics, and labor market conditions, and after adjusting for segregation into lower-quality jobs.  This unexplained inequality points to discrimination. This is not to say that some of these other factors are not also discrimination. Human capital factors such as educational inequality and sorting and segregation into lower-quality jobs are two clear examples of upstream discrimination that impact service sector workers. However, it is important to know that these upstream inequalities cannot fully explain service sector disparities. Unexplained discrimination in our data often occurs at the managerial level, with items that allow for managerial discretion such as scheduling often seeing larger disparities between groups, as opposed to more standardized items such as wages and benefits.

Raising the Floor on Breaks

Shift researchers’ finding that when the floor was raised for breaks policies, women and people of color disproportionately benefitted overall due to their concentration in affected jobs (2024).