How do gender differences in family responsibilities affect doctors' labour supply? Evidence from Australian panel data

Abstract

We use nine annual waves of a unique longitudinal dataset of Australian doctors to examine how children and family responsibilities influence the number of hours worked by female and male medical doctors. We exploit the longitudinal feature of the data to investigate how hours worked change in response to within-doctor changes in family circumstances over time. We find strong evidence of a 'carer effect' of having children for female doctors, whose working hours are significantly reduced by the presence of children, the number of children, and young children. The working hours by female doctors are also strongly influenced by the employment status of their spouses. In contrast, for male doctors, having children leads to a slight increase in hours worked. The effect of children in dual medical career households is highly asymmetric: female doctors reduce their hours worked by a very large margin, whereas male doctors report not changing their working hours. Finally we also find evidence of heterogeneous effects of how family circumstances affect hours worked across different quantiles of hours worked.

Keywords: Australia; Family circumstances; Gender difference; Hours worked; Medical labour market; Panel data.