Tag: hit&run

A controversial Tennessee law criminalizing mothers of newborns who test positive for narcotics is set to expire this summer, after lawmakers failed to re-authorize the law this week. Under the measure, passed in 2014, Tennessee women can be charged with assault—punishable by up to 15 years in prison—for giving birth to an infant “addicted to or harmed by” a narcotic drug. 

The law is controversial because no one wants to condone drug use by pregant women. But opponents of the law—including the American Medical Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, and those of us who covered it here at Reason—argue that criminalization isn’t the answer, as threatening drug-dependent women with jail only discourages them from seeking things like prenatal care and addiction treatment, or from giving birth in hospitals. 

What’s more, laws like this aren’t just used against those who actually cause their babies harm (despite the statutory language). In July 2014, the first woman to be charged under the new law, Mallory Loyola, was arrested after her newborn tested positive for methamphetamine. But the baby was born healthy, and according to the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, there “is no syndrome or disorder that can specifically be identified for babies who were exposed in utero to methamphetamine.” Meanwhile, alcohol poses a great risk to fetuses, at least when consumed excess of a certain amount. Yet, as Jacob Sullum noted, “while an expectant mother who drinks a glass of wine in public might attract glares from busybodies, she probably will not attract attention from the police.” 

The charges against Loyola were eventually dropped after she completed a rehab program. But many more women have been arrested since her—around 100, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel.

Meanwhile, the number of Tennessee newborns who test positive for narcotics has, at least at some hospitals, only increased. And at places such as the University of Tennessee Medical Center, the incidence of deliveries outside the hospital has almost doubled, staff say. 

The Tennessee fetal assault law will expire July 1, 2016, if no further action is taken by state legislators. 

Police arrested a Longwood, Florida, 12-year-old girl for pinching a male classmate’s butt during school hours. Breana Evans has been charged with misdemeanor battery and was temporarily placed in juvenile detention. 

Everybody involved in this story—Breana, her father, the cops, her alleged victim—thinks the arrest is an overreaction. Everybody, except the boy’s mom, who alerted police and demanded that they prosecute. 

“I regret it because I didn’t know it would lead to this,” Breana told WPTV.com. 

Breana claims she didn’t know the boy. She pinched him because that’s just something her friends do. Keep in mind that she is 12. 

The school resource deputy—that’s the police officer who patrols the school—didn’t charge her with a crime because the boy didn’t want to press charges. Instead, Breana was suspended. 

But the boy’s mother insisted to police that he was the victim of battery, and so they had no choice but to arrest Breana. She was Mirandized and put in a patrol car. They took her mugshot and booked her into juvenile detention. 

The state attorney said that Breana will have to complete community service, submit to drug tests, and take classes. If she does all those things, the charges will eventually be dismissed. 

Breana’s actions were wrong. She should not have violated that boy’s personal space. It was appropriate for the school to tell her to keep her hands to herself, and even to give her some light punishment. But a suspension seems a tad overboard, unless the boy was deeply humiliated or scarred. Nothing in the story suggests that this was the case. 

Part of growing up is learning to respect other people’s boundaries, and schools should play a role in instructing kids to behave like adults. 

The police, on the other hand, have no role to play in the lives of non-violent, non-troubled kids who are making typical kid mistakes. It is ludicrous to charge Breana with a crime. She’s not a criminal, she’s a normal pre-teen. Kids push each other around. They mess with each other. Police should interfere only when such conduct is actually threatening. A kid who repeatedly punches another kid might deserve a visit to juvenile detention. A kid who pinches another kid deserves a time-out. 

But given the new obsession with child safety, and paranoia about sex crimes, I’m actually a bit surprised Breana hasn’t also been charged with sexual harassment. If Breanna were a boy and the victim a girl, perhaps the authorities would have imposed a harsher sentence. (A 13-year-old boy in Maryland who kissed a 14-year-old girl on a dare was charged with second-degree assault.) 

“Lord, lord, lord, what’s this world come to?” asked Breana’s father. “Kid can’t even be a kid.” 

And that’s exactly the problem. When we expect perfect behavior from children, we set them up for failure. If they’re not allowed to make mistakes, then they’re not allowed to grow up. Putting a kid in jail for a one-off physical encounter is cruel, it’s unnecessary, and it betrays a profound naivety about the social development of young people. 

America’s physicians have been conscripted as law enforcement agents in the never-ending War on Drugs, and it puts them in a moral dilemma.

As media attention has turned to the recent national surge in prescription-opioid and heroin abuse, politicians feel compelled to be ready with “solutions.” The Obama Administration last summer announced $100 million in new funding for drug-addiction centers. Hillary Clinton proposed a $10 billion criminal justice initiative including increased grants to states for drug treatment centers, as well as training and equipping first responders to administer heroin overdose antidotes.

“As a doctor,” writes Jeffrey A. Singer, “I react to these reports with great apprehension, because public policy will inevitably impact my profession and me.” 

View this article.

When an industry demands that the government regulate it more strictly, you usually don’t have to look very far to find a barely-hidden agenda. A case in point: In 2008 the catfish industry pushed through tighter controls on catfish, citing alleged health and safety concerns. (Summarizing quickly, the revised rules classified catfish—unlike other fish—as “meat” and subjected it to stricter inspections.) Patrick Mustain, writing in Scientific American, reports that (a) the industry’s health and safety arguments were weak, and (b) to the extent that those arguments had merit at all, they applied just as much to other sorts of seafood, yet the people pushing the regulations have had no interest in extending them beyond catfish.

“By now,” Mustain concludes, “you’ve probably figured out that consumer safety is not in fact the likely inspiration for this rule.” The actual target was farm-raised catfish from China, Vietnam, and Thailand. The businesses raising catfish in ponds in Mississippi have an easier time meeting the new requirements than the Asian exporters do, so the rules undercut the foreign competition.

But not just the foreign competition. As Mustain notes, the barriers also affect the trade in the Chesapeake Bay’s blue catfish, which isn’t farm-raised at all—it’s caught in the wild. And that may have ill effects for the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem, since the market for blue catfish helps keep the creature under control. The blue catfish is an invasive species that eats virtually everything and in turn is eaten by just one animal: us.

The whole piece is worth reading; to check it out, go here.

College students feel the Bern in a major way, says a new study of people at 100 universities around the country.

According to Student Monitor, a research-and-content shop for student publications, almost three-quarters of respondents said they planned to vote (yeah, yeah, I know: They also plan to go to that Friday 8 A.M. p-chem class too).

Of those planning on voting, fully 44 percent are going to punch a hole for Bernie Sanders, with just 21 percent coloring in for Hillary Clinton and a mere 8 percent rooting for Donald Trump (probably all of them attend Emory).

And there’s this, which can’t be making Reince Priebus or any of the dozen or so Republicans who remember that Mitt Romney got his ass kicked in 2012 by the weakest incumbent since Herbert Hoover: “Among those with a preference, 65% plan to vote for a Democrat, compared to 35% for a Republican.”

Read more at Inside Higher Ed.

It’s easy to file heavily Democratic leanings among college students under “no duh.” But that’s simply ahistorical. Time was when the GOP could pull huge numbers of the student voters and youth voters (18-29 years old) more broadly. Yes, Barack Obama pulverized Romney in 2012, winning 62 percent of the under-30 vote to Romney’s 38 percent. But those numbers were actually lower than in 2008, when Obama pulled even bigger percentages. Yet as recently as 2000, Al Gore and George W. Bush split the 18-24 vote, with each taking 47 percent (Ralph Nader pulled 5 percent, almost most certainly from Gore). Ronald Reagan came close to tying Jimmy Carter in 1980 before crushing Walter Mondale among the youngs in 1984. George H.W. Bush trounced Mike Dukakis among the same cohort in 1988:

Hell, even Richard Nixon pulled 48 percent of the youth vote in 1972 against hippie savior George McGovern. So it’s not like Republicans can’t do well among younger voters, including college kids. In fact, if they want to win presidential elections, they have to. Or at least stay within 10 percentage points or so.

Republicans are unlikely to do so well anytime soon. There’s no question that youth support for Obama was something of an aberration that almost no candidate will match again. He was young, black, progressive, good at soaring oratory, etc. at exactly the right time in recent history. That he was matched up against a broken-down old man who seemed out of touch with almost everything in 2008 and then a blow-dried one-term governor who had created the pilot program for Obamacare in 2012 only served to run up the score among younger voters. Simply put, Obama was a perfect youth candidate while McCain and Romney were terrible youth candidates.

Here’s the problem and opportunity for Republicans: Millennials aren’t idiots, so they’re not simply in the tank for Democrats no matter what (recall the youthful enthusiasm surrounding Ron Paul’s presidential campaigns, which was hardly based on Sanders-like promises of more free everything).

In fact, millennials are markedly less partisan than their elders despite having voted big for Obama; they are up for grabs politically and ideologically. But as the Reason-Rupe Millennial poll back in 2014 pointed out, there are certain threshold attitudes that reliably turn off younger Americans. For younger voters, it’s “culture first, politics second” and if you’re against same-sex marriage, pot legalization, and humane treatment of immigrants any conversation is over before it gets started.

Which is to say: It was nice knowing you, Republicans. However awful Donald Trump is when it comes to immigrants, his chief opponent for the GOP presidential nomination, Ted Cruz, is worse. Indeed, one of Cruz’s lines of attack (shared by the editors of National Review and other conservative outlets) is that Donald Trump is soft on immigration. He would, don’t you know, allow back into the United States some of the 12 million illegals he promises to deport, thus revealing his sickeningly inhumane program as just “a poorly disguised amnesty” scam! 

When it comes to same-sex marriage, which Americans overwhelmingly support, Republican elders have started to hold their tongues about the wickedness of it all, but it may well be too little too late to win the hearts, minds, and votes of millennials. Sixty-one percent of millennial Republicans support gay marriage, which is higher than the overall average for all voters of all parties and all ages. And yet the GOP leadership can’t quite hide its moral revulsion at the idea of the state treating individuals in a non-discriminatory way and leading GOP folks ranging from Cruz to Mike Huckabee went out of their way to publicly support Kim Davis, the Kentucky County clerk who refused to abide a Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage. Mounting jesuitical arguments about how it’s really the states that should be deciding marriage law (even as Republicans pass laws defining marriage as only between one man and one woman) or that the Supreme Court has overstepped its bounds. Those sorts of arguments may be great in debating tournaments but they alienate just about everyone else who knows exactly what most Republican leaders have bee saying for decades: Gays shouldn’t be allowed to get married like normal people. In this, by the way, Trump may be less bad than a Cruz or a Kasich, since part of his terrifying “New York values” is plainly not to give a hoot about people’s sexuality. If only he could extend that sense of decency to people’s countries of origin and religion.

You can almost hear the geniuses at Republican Central reading surveys of younger votes and just writing them off, like they have done with Hispanics. Who needs them? We can’t win them anyway because we won’t just dish out free stuff (at least not to kids)! They’ll change parties when they get their first job and encounter FICA taxes (that fund Social Security and Medicare, which we refuse to reform)!

It was only a few years ago that it seemed likely a young crop of Republican pols—including Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan—would lead small-government conservatism and libertarianism into the political mainstream. Man, wasn’t that a time! Rand Paul wowed crowds with lines such as

[Republicans] need to be white, we need to be brown, we need to be black, we need to be with tattoos, without tattoos, with pony tails, without pony tails, with beards, without.

At CPAC (of all places!), he talked about the GOP having become “stale” and “moss-covered.” But the moss won and Rand Paul tacked hard-right during his presidential run, calling for an end to refugees and immigrants from suspect countries, and Marco Rubio promised never to reform Social Security if it was bad for his mother. And the last three Republicans standing are not just weak on the threshold issues millennials care about, they are truly godawful.

The worst part of all this is that millennials don’t love or even like the Democrats and their policies. In 2013, the College Republican National Committee (CRNC) issued a report about young voters. Consider this:

Millennials, says the report, don’t care much about abstractions such as that favorite Republican bogeyman, “big government.” But they are into cutting government spending and reducing the national debt, as they realize both things are strangling their future before it begins. Fully 90 percent agree that Social Security and Medicare need to be reformed now, 82 percent are ready to “make tough choices about cutting government spending, even on some programs some people really like,” and 72 percent want to cut the size of government “because it is simply too big.” Only 17 percent want to increase spending on defense and just 30 percent said that “marriage should be legally defined as only between a man and a women,” with 44 percent saying same-sex marriage should be legal everywhere and 26 percent saying it should be up to individual states.

If the Republican Party is in fact ready to implode over the possibility that Donald Trump could be its presidential candidate, whatever rises up from its ashes would do well to understand what millennials—the single-largest generation in American history—wants from its politics. It’s not the played-out, proven-failure, free-government-everything that the wizened “democratic socialist” is hawking, or the neo-con adventurism of Hillary Clinton, each of whom hates Uber, for god’s sake. They are doing well among college students mostly because nobody else is talking to millennials about future that might be more free and more prosperous. The future painted by Republicans isn’t about innovation and prosperity or living your life as you see fit. It’s inevitably about an America where gays are at least still marginalized when it comes to marriage and the drug war status quo is in place. An America where there are no more Mexicans and Syrian refugees and that is great because it has bombed ISIS and whatever inevitably replaces it into submission. Not very inspiring, to say the least.

If the GOP can lay off the culture-war stuff, especially ranking on gay marriage and pot legalization, and stop demonizing the dwindling population of illegal immigrants as the greatest threat to life, liberty, and the American Way, they might have a shot at breaking into double digits with today’s college kids. And tomorrow’s voters for the next 50 years.

The 2016 candidates aren’t just campaigning against each other, they’re campaigning against free trade. A. Barton Hinkle writes:

Almost three-fifths of Americans recognize that international trade offers the country an opportunity to expand the economy; only 34 percent see it as a threat. Unfortunately, the leading presidential contenders are doing their best to change that.

Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have been spouting a stream of nonsense remarkable even by campaign-season standards. Sanders, for instance, blames the decline of Detroit and Flint, Mich., on “Hillary Clinton’s free-trade policies.” But as Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune points out, GM shut down its Flint plant six years before NAFTA took effect. Other factors—such as automation—have done most of the damage to auto-industry employment.

View this article.

It’s another win for freedom—the freedom to consensually beat the crap out of each other in front of a cheering, paying audience. New York’s Assembly, after deflecting the issue for years, has voted this week to end the state’s ban on professional mixed martial arts (MMA) sports events.

Tuesday’s vote marks the end of all state bans on the sport come August, assuming Gov. Andrew Cuomo signs the bill as he has pledged. New York was the final holdout and has been keeping this very popular, very mainstream sport out of the state for 19 years now (Read the history of New York banning MMA events here).

Although the bill passed easily (the major force keeping it from the Assembly floor was former Democratic Speaker Sheldon Silver, who was convicted of corruption), there were still government nannies who took it as a point of pride to say they should use their authority to control how Americans entertain themselves. From Gannett’s New York reporting:

Some Democrats remained opposed to the measure, including Assemblywoman Ellen Jaffee, D-Suffern, Rockland County, who spoke out Tuesday against the violent nature of the sport. In UFC bouts, fighters battle in eight-sided cages, with the violent bouts frequently ending with bloodied fighters and a knockout or chokehold.

“Cage fighting, also known as MMA, has no place in a civilized society,” Jaffee said on the Assembly floor. “It is a spectacle of violence. Except for those who stand to profit from this barbaric entertainment masquerading as a sport, cage fighting causes great harm.”

Assemblyman Danny O’Donnell, D-Manhattan, was more graphic during the Assembly’s debate, likening the sport − in which fighters wear little clothing and frequently grapple — to “gay porn with a different ending.” O’Donnell, who is openly gay, said money was fueling the effort to overturn the ban — both the lobbying funds spent by UFC and the money gambling interests stand to gain.

“Not a single person is harmed in this state or this country based on our failure to let them do this,” O’Donnell said. “But if we do let them do it, more people are going to become addicted to gambling, more people are going to see violence, more people are going to turn to violence as a mechanism to express how they feel.”

“Failure to let them do this” is a very interesting (and by “interesting” I mean “absolutely awful”) way to describe using the force of law to threaten people with fines and arrest for doing things with their bodies that O’Donnell does not approve of. If only there were other examples of the government controlling what two men were permitted to do to each other because people thought it would corrupt society in a bad way.

But as a reminder, this sort of nannying was not just confined to the left. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) famously used his power to try to keep MMA fights off television. But the sport is now more popular than ever.

• Donald Trump suffered a major blow in Utah, where Sen. Ted Cruz earned 71 percent of the primary vote, John Kasich 16 percent, and Trump just 14 percent. “Cruz’s big win in Utah means he will get all 40 of the state’s delegates to the Republican National Convention,” AP reports. Yet Trump still won the most delegates yesterday, picking up 58 from a win in Arizona, where Cruz placed second. 
• Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders bested Hillary Clinton in Idaho and Utah primaries, while Clinton won in Arizona. 
• Sen. Ted Cruz is trying to entice Ohio Gov. John Kasich into dropping out of the Republican presidential race by floating him a spot in a future Cruz administration. 
• Jeb Bush has endorsed Ted Cruz, saying he hopes the Texas senator will help “overcome the divisiveness and vulgarity” of Donald Trump
• Belgian police are still searching Najim Laachraoui, a suspect in yesterday’s attacks in Brussels. While Laachraoui—who was with the two suicide bombers at the Brussels airport yesterday, and whose DNA was found in an apartment connected to the Paris terrorists attacks of 2015—was reported yesterday to have been arrested, this turned out to be false. 
• Georgia is moving to make solicitation of prostitution a felony. 

Early in the morning on June 9, 2012, police responding to a report of a home invasion in North Chicago, Illinois, found $271,080 inside a safe in a van parked outside the house. If you are familiar with civil asset forfeiture, you can guess what happened next: The cops took the cash, alleging that it had something to do with drug trafficking. But you might not guess what happened after that: Last week a federal appeals court took a stand against government-sanctioned robbery, saying assumptions cannot take the place of actual evidence when police claim property is tainted by crime.

Pedro and Abraham Cruz-Hernandez, brothers who lived at the North Chicago house with six other people, said the money was their savings from 12 years of legitimate work. Pedro, who owned the van, said he had moved the safe there because he was worried that whoever had broken into the house would come back. Unmoved by their protests, U.S. District Judge Joan B. Gottschall approved the forfeiture without a trial, saying the brothers had not established that the money was theirs and that in any case the govenment “pointed to substantial circumstantial evidence indicating that the claimants’ interest in the money is not legitimate and that the money is connected to criminal activity.”

Nonsense, said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in a ruling issued last Thursday. In fact, writes Judge Diane Wood on behalf of a unanimous three-judge panel, “the government has presented virtually no evidence that the brothers are involved in drug trafficking.” While police found “a handgun, a digital scale, and a small amount of marijuana” in one of the bedrooms of the house, the government did not establish whose bedroom it was or show any connection between those items and the cash in the van. A drug-sniffing dog supposedly alerted to the van, on the strength of which police obtained a warrant to search the vehicle, and a second dog supposedly alerted to the safe, but no drugs were found in either place, and “the government did not submit to the court any evidence of the dogs’ training, methodology, or field performance.” 

Although it might not be obvious from the way cash-hungry cops routinely behave, the fact that someone has a large amount of currency is not enough by itself to justify a seizure. “Absent other evidence connecting the money to drugs,” Wood writes, quoting an earlier 7th Circuit decision, “the existence of money or its method of storage are not enough to establish probable cause for forfeiture,” let alone meet the “preponderance of evidence” test for keeping the money. Doing the math, she concludes that the owners’ explanation of where the money came from is plausible:

There is evidence in the record that supports the brothers’ testimony that they earned the money legally. They documented income since 2000 that between them totaled just over $680,000. After subtracting the money found in the safe and all other expenses described in their depositions and other records, the brothers had approximately $320,214—roughly $1,026 each per month—left to cover living expenses. The government pointed to no evidence suggesting that any of the brothers’ evidence of income is fabricated or that they have lavish spending habits. Because the brothers realistically could have saved the $271,080 at issue, there is a genuine dispute of fact that precludes summary judgment for the government.

Given the weakness of the government’s case and the plausibility of the brothers’ story, Wood says, Pedro and Abraham Cruz-Hernandez deserve their day in court. “There is a genuine dispute over whether the money in this case is substantially connected to drug trafficking,” she concludes, and “a jury reasonably could believe that the government has failed to meet its burden to prove that connection.” The 7th Circuit therefore sent the case back down to the district court, where the government will have to try a bit harder if it wants to keep the cash.

That may not sound like a resounding victory for due process and property rights, but the scrutiny the appeals court applied to this case is a refreshing change from the rubber stamp employed by other circuits. In 2006, for example, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, reversing a more skeptical federal judge, upheld the forfeiture of $124,700 that a Nebraska state trooper took from Emiliano Gonzolez after pulling him over for speeding. Gonzolez said the money was intended to buy a refrigerated truck for a produce business, but the cops figured all that cash must have come from selling drugs, or maybe it was intended to buy drugs. The details were not important, as long as the result was more funding for the Nebraska State Patrol. As in this case, there was no evidence that Gonzalez had ever been involved in drug trafficking.

[Thanks to Nick Sibilla for the tip.]

In America and the U.K., the “gender pay gap”—the space that separates average male-worker wages from average female-worker wages—has been picking up steam as an important political topic, especially as elections near. In the process, a lot of misinformation is also gaining traction. Yet rigorous research on the gender pay gap paints quite a different picture than the political spin on it does.

As evidence, see this recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (“The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanation”), co-authored by Cornell economists Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn. Blau and Kahn looked at gender pay gap stats dating back to the 1950s and stretching through 2010. What they found—in the U.S. and other economically advanced countries—is that the difference in average pay between men and women in the workforce has been declining for decades. But this hasn’t been happening at an equal rate for workers across income brackets, nor has progress been steady over the past few decades. 

The gender pay gap shrank the most in the 1980s. “The period of strongest wage convergence between men and women was the 1980s,” found the economists. Progress at narrowing the pay gap “has been slower and more uneven since then.”

In 1980, American women’s average hourly earnings were about 63 percent of men’s, but by 1989, women were earning 73 percent of what men did. But since the 1980s, the gap has closed much less quickly. In 2010, women were making 79 percent of men’s overall wages. In 2014, full-time female workers earned about 79 percent of what men did on an annual basis and about 83 percent when wages were measured weekly. 

Wage-gap narrowing wasn’t tied to government policies. In a section on the impact of government policies on the gender pay gap, Blau and Kahn explore whether “the time path of the increase in women’s relative earnings appears compatible with an effect of [federal] laws and regulations.” In short: not really.  

“We see no indication of a notable improvement in women’s relative earnings in the immediate post-1964 period that might be attributable to the effects of the government’s antidiscrimination effort,” Blau and Kahn write. And while gains were made in select fields, the overall gender pay gap “remained basically flat through the late 1970s or early 1980s,” also times of relatively high government action in this area. Meanwhile, “the largest female relative wage gains and the strongest evidence of a decline in the unexplained gender wage gap were during the 1980s… which includes a period in which the government’s antidiscrimination effort was noticeably scaled back.” 

So what does explain the closing of the gender pay gap in the 1980s? One suggestion researchers offer is a shift in the labor market that favored women. The decline of manufacturing jobs and other industries involving physical labor during this time, along with the rise of white-collar and computer-utilizing jobs, “appear to have favored women relative to men in certain ways.” Trends that tilted toward men in the 1990s—the researchers don’t mention any industries in particular, but the early Internet companies seem one likely culprit—may explain the slow down in closing the gender pay gap. 

Gender differences in occupations and job roles matter most. Researchers call variables like education level and past experience “human capital factors.” In the mid- to late-20th Century, human capital factors were one of the biggest reasons behind the gender pay gap. But the role these factors play has been dropping, due “both to the reversal of the education gap between men and women and the narrowing of the gender gap in experience,” Blau and Kah note.

In 1980, the experience gap explained 24 percent of the gender gap, but this was down to 16 percent in 2010.

Yet “employment segregation by sex” still factors significantly into wage differences. In fact, “gender differences in occupations and industries are quantitatively the most important measurable factors explaining the gender wage gap,” according to Blau and Kahn. The share of the gap accounted for by “factors like occupation and industry actually increased from 27 percent of the 1980 gap to 49 percent of the much smaller 2010 gap,” they write. 

High-income women have seen the smallest wage-gap closing.

Between 1980 and 2010, the wage gap narrowed more slowly for women at the top income and job levels than it did for lower-paid and less specialized counterparts. By 2010, the gender wage gap, “which had been similar across the wage distribution in the 1980s, [was] larger for the highly skilled than for others,” write researchers. 

“Labor force interruptions” to have or care for children and a need for more flexible hours may penalize workers in some professions, such as law and business, more than those in lower-wage occupations, they suggest.  Studies have shown that “work histories and current hours seem to be a particularly important determinant of gender wgae differences” in some high-wage professions, and work flexibility (working non-traditional hours or from home) imposes a higher wage penalty on people with law degrees and MBAs. 

Findings are fuzzy about the impact of family-leave policies.

“The effect of parental leaves on the gender wage gap is theoretically ambiguous,” according to Blau and Kahn’s research. “Empirical evidence in the United States suggests that the effect of the [Family and Medical Leave Act] has been modest.”

If anything, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA)—which mandates 12 weeks unpaid but job-protected medical leave following the birth or adoption of a child or in event of a spouse or dependent falling seriously ill—has had a small positive effect on women’s employment level overall but no effect on the wage gap, according to one large study. A smaller study on the effect of California’s 2004 law mandating six weeks of paid parental leave also showed that more people went back to work post-leave, but the effect on wages wasn’t significant. And a 2015 study suggested the FMLA increased the gender gap in promotions. 

Global studies show similarly mixed results. In a 1998 study of nine Western countries, not including the U.S., researchers found women’s wages were unaffected by short parental leave policies but suffered with leave policies of more than five months. An earlier study by Blau and Kahn found that hte expansion of family-leave policies in non-U.S., economically advance nations between 1990 and 2010 resulted in an overal increase in female labor force participation” but was also associated with “a lower likelihood of women having full-time jobs or working as managers or professionals.”