Abortion is now illegal in 14 states. Here's how that could widen the gender pay gap.

By Zoe Han

'Abortion is deeply rooted in the class system,' a law professor tells MarketWatch two years after the end of Roe v. Wade

The Value Gap is a MarketWatch interview series with business leaders, academics, policy makers and activists on reducing racial and social inequalities.

Women who can decide when - or whether - to have children are the most likely to advance professionally, and that dynamic is fueling a class divide among women that has grown in the two years since the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated federal protection for abortion access, according to the authors of a new book.

That same dynamic also has bleak implications for the longstanding gender pay gap, say law professors Naomi Cahn of the University of Virginia School of Law, June Carbone of the University of Minnesota Law School and Nancy Levit of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, who are the co-authors of "Fair Shake: Women and the Fight to Build a Just Economy."

Since the Supreme Court's 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, 14 Republican-led states have made most abortions illegal, and other states have imposed gestational limits on abortion access. These bans and restrictions have resulted in the closure of clinics across the country, threatened access to medication used in abortion care and miscarriage care, and created uncertainty over the future of in vitro fertilization. Clinics and healthcare providers have seen a sharp increase in the number of people traveling across state lines for abortion care. Access to contraception has also become more restricted in some states.

The Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade - the landmark case that had protected the right to abortion for nearly 50 years - will also have consequences for women in the workplace, Cahn, Carbone and Levit say, widening the divides between women in different states and with different racial backgrounds, and between those with good-paying jobs who can travel for abortion care and those who lack such resources.

States with restrictions on abortion also tend to have fewer protections for low-income workers - who are predominantly women - and less support for families with children when it comes to policies like minimum wage, paid family leave, subsidized child care and healthcare coverage, the authors say. Working-class women in those states "are at the greatest disadvantage" in getting care for themselves and their babies immediately after giving birth, Carbone says.

"Abortion is deeply rooted in the class system," she adds.

The authors point to the Turnaway Study, which tracked 1,000 women over 10 years to look at the effects of being denied a wanted abortion. One 2020 paper about the study found that women who were denied an abortion saw a 78% increase in their amount of past-due debt compared with their average before giving birth, as well as an 81% increase in the incidence of bankruptcy, evictions and tax liens on their credit reports.

In the Dobbs ruling, the Supreme Court majority cited federal and state laws banning employment discrimination based on pregnancy as evidence that the circumstances of pregnant women and their babies have improved since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, but according to Cahn, Carbone and Levit, that's not the case. It has historically been difficult to win a pregnancy-discrimination lawsuit, they say, and the people most likely to lose their jobs because of pregnancy are working-class women, who seldom have access to a lawyer.

The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which went into effect last year, granted people the right to workplace accommodations for pregnancy and related conditions. But when it comes to the gender pay gap and the class divide, Cahn, Carbone and Levit say, that law will only help "marginally" as long as the systemic issue - the "winner-take-all economy" they describe in their book - is not addressed.

Although the gender pay gap narrowed substantially in the 1980s, progress has slowed since the late 1990s. Since 2019, woman have been the better-educated half of the labor force, but the gender pay gap persists even among graduates of highly selective colleges, research shows. Around the same time that women's progress with pay stalled, CEO salaries skyrocketed and the pay gap between executives and workers widened, the authors note, with the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay growing from around 20 to 1 in the 1960s to 347 to 1 in 2020.

"If you have a dog-eat-dog workplace, women lose," Carbone says. "Women lose partly because of childbearing responsibilities, but they also lose because such environments breed sexual harassment, bullying of other men and more insular groups plotting their own advancement."

MarketWatch spoke with Cahn, Carbone and Levit about the economic consequences of women losing access to abortion. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

MarketWatch: In your book, you talk about the Dobbs decision and its potential effects. How do reproductive rights, and specifically access to abortion, factor into the conversation about the gender wage gap?

Naomi Cahn: It turns out that states with access to abortion have lower gender pay gaps. So the five states that have the narrowest pay gaps between men and women are Vermont, New York, Nevada, Alaska and California, and several of them have actually moved to strengthen the ability to access an abortion. By contrast, the states with the greatest gender pay gaps, most of them have restricted access to abortion or banned it altogether. So that's just a data point on state policies and abortion and its correlation with the gender pay gap.

[Editor's note: Data published in March by the National Women's Law Center, a nonprofit focused on women's rights, shows the five states with the narrowest gender pay gaps are California, Vermont, New York, Arizona and Nevada, with Alaska ranking sixth. The six states with the biggest gender pay gaps are Utah, Louisiana, Alabama, New Hampshire, Idaho and Mississippi.]

Obviously, both contraception and abortion give people the right to control. Not everybody, of course, can control when they become pregnant. Contraception helps with that. Abortion can help, but the U.S. has an incredibly high unintended-pregnancy rate - depending on where you get your statistics, 35% to 40%, or more than 5 million unintended pregnancies each year. And if you are living in an abortion-restrictive state, and you're pregnant and don't want to be pregnant, it's much harder to get access to an abortion.

June Carbone: I think one of the things to understand about the "winner-take-all" economy is how it's related to growing inequality in the U.S. The classic studies of how the labor market has changed are in the [2011] book "Good Jobs, Bad Jobs." There are more high-paying jobs - [in] tech, for example - but there are also more low-paying jobs. There's less in the middle.

When you look at women, and you look at the class divide, women's income correlates very closely with their terminal degree [the highest level of education in a given field]. It's less so for men. What is thought of as women's occupations - teaching, healthcare, nurses, social workers - all of those kinds of occupations require degrees, and the way to get a promotion is to get a master's. So women are much more dependent on education.

What you see is that if you can postpone childbearing until you get not just the terminal degree, but the first job or two or three, and if you're a college graduate, you're quite likely to move during that time period, at least, [not only] to switch jobs, but often move cities. If you get past that, then what you see is the delay in childbearing correlates with higher income.

So women who graduated from college or have an advanced degree get a job, then they get married and have kids - and they are very likely to be married. Postponing childbearing pays off, because not only do they end up with better jobs, they get better jobs that are more family-friendly, supportive and have benefits. The women who had good jobs when COVID hit kept them. They had more flexibility in working from home, etc. - which doesn't mean that they weren't disadvantaged compared to their husbands. That does mean they stayed in the labor market and kept the benefits they had worked very hard to get.

When you then look at women who don't graduate from college, what you see is a set of patterns where they cycle in and out of dead-end jobs. They are dramatically less likely to have paid family leave. They are dramatically more likely either to quit or be forced out when they become pregnant. If they hit child-care needs in an inflexible workplace, they quit, or they're fired, and then they come back to dead-end jobs. So what you have is a two-tiered system of providing childcare.

Now, a lot of our book is for women in the good jobs. That doesn't mean they're on the management track to become CEO. Childbearing is still a disadvantage, but women tend to gravitate to jobs they can keep after they have kids, and you see the lowest level of dropping out of the labor market [among] the highest-educated women.

So what happens then with abortion? The lack of access to abortion disrupts the ability to stay in school, making it harder to come back afterward. When you look at college-graduate women, they abort the highest percentage of unplanned pregnancies, because they are much more likely to abort a pregnancy that gets in the way of not just a good job, but a good marriage. If it's the wrong guy in an accidental pregnancy at the age of 21, the abortion makes it possible for them to stay in school - and it's not just their job prospects, but the odds of being happily married at some point in the future go up.

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