How the Maternity Leave Influences the Gender Wage Gap

The research analyses the dependence of gender wage gap on the amount of maternity leave days and benefits set by law. To account for potential omitted variable bias, several control variables are added: fertility rate, completion rate of at least Bachelor education, employment rate, male dominance in public and private sector, marriage rate and length of father-specific leave. The data reflects the macro-level observations for 111 countries during the 2009-2016 period taken from the World Bank, OECD, ILO and the UN sources. The method used for the estimation of the panel data is a simple OLS regression in different Specifications, including fixed effects. It is found out that the effect of maternity leave variables is statistically significant, though ambiguous in terms of direction. However, they stop being significant under the presence of fixed effects, while female Bachelor education, job-related factors and length of father-specific leave appear to be significant in explaining the variation of gender wage gap.