Does Anti-Discrimination Legislation Work? The Case of Motherhood Penalty in the Czech Republic
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Does Anti-Discrimination Legislation Work? The Case of Motherhood Penalty in the Czech Republic Drahomíra Zajíčková 1 & Miroslav Zajíček 2
& Martina Rašticová
3
Accepted: 22 September 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
The paper explores the effect of implementation of the Antidiscrimination Act 2009 (ADA) in the Czech Republic on a size of the motherhood penalty using the EU SILC data over the years 2006 through 2017. We employ several methods to estimate the impact and to show that ADA leads to a substantial decline in the motherhood penalty. Before the ADA implementation the average motherhood penalty fluctuated between 12% and 17,5%, after the ADA implementation the statistical significance of motherhood penalty disappeared. However, we also find that wage penalties stemming from the lower work experience due to motherhood-related breaks and lower work intensity during the motherhood are still substantial (10,12%). Keywords Motherhood penalty . Gender . Labor market . Mitigation policies . EU SILC . Discrimination JEL Classification J24 . J30 . J39 Abbreviations ADA Anti-discrimination Act of 2009 CEE Central and Eastern Europe EEC European Economic Community EU SILC European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions
* Miroslav Zajíček [email protected] Drahomíra Zajíčková [email protected] Martina Rašticová [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal
Introduction The impact of antidiscrimination legislation on economic outcomes has been of interest in economic literature at least from the passage of the Civil Rights and Equal Pay Acts in 1960s and 1970s in the United Stated1 that dealt with sex and race discrimination. There are two important questions regarding such a public policy. The first one concerns the need for such a policy. In a nutshell, whether the labor market differences are caused by discrimination or not and whether competition on labor markets can or cannot prevent the discriminatory behavior itself. This question stems mainly from Becker (1971), Ashenfelter and Hannan (1986), Hellerstein et al. (2002), Heckman (1998), Darity and Mason (1998) followed by a whole family of similar papers. The other question, which is the main focus of this paper, concerns with the efficiency of such a public policy, i.e. whether anti-discrimination legislation leads to real labor market outcomes improvements for groups in questions (mainly minorities of various natures and women). The European legislation can be seen to a certain degree as a counter-part for the federal legislation in the US. The most ambitious anti-discriminatory laws at the EU level are the two EU directives: the EU Racial Equality Directive (Council Directive 2000/43/EC) and the Employment Equality Directive (Council Directive 2000/78/EC) trying to tackle one of the possible sources of the wage gap – a direct discrimination. The Member states were obliged to trans
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