France has narrowed its gender lifetime earnings gap, but has not managed closed it. Despite legal guarantees, French women still earn 30% less than men over a career. This column tracks lifetime income for cohorts born 1942–1964 and finds that convergence has stalled since the 1980s, mostly due to rising part-time work among women. Working time now explains nearly 80% of the gap. The findings suggest that transparency reforms, childcare access, and individual taxation are likely key to boosting full-time careers and closing gender earnings gaps.
The EU Pay-Transparency Directive (2023/970) has highlighted the persistence of gender pay inequality in France. Despite legal guarantees since 1972, strengthened by the 1983 “Roudy Act”, official data still show an hourly wage gap of around 12%. The Directive increased pressure by requiring firms to disclose detailed statistics and urging member states to “monitor convergence over the course of a career”. A growing body of research implies that a long horizon is crucial to fully understand gender gaps. First, Goldin et al. (2017) show that “the gender earnings gap is a shifting statistic” over the lifecycle. Second, recent work for the US finds that women have gained ground chiefly by increasing their lifetime earnings faster than men (Guvenen et al. 2022). Lifetime, not annual, measures therefore tell a more complete story on gender inequality.
Our study (Garbinti et al. 2025) takes up this perspective. Using administrative payroll-tax records that follow a sample of workers in France from 1967 to 2019, we sum each individual’s annual labour income between ages 25 and 55 to construct lifetime earnings (LTE) for successive birth-cohorts born between 1942 and 1964. We then compare France with the US and break down the observed LTE gap with a Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition, separating differences in hours worked, education, occupation and other observables from an unexplained residual.
Progress without convergence?
Figure 1 presents the gender gap at the median. In France, the ratio of female-to-male LTE grows moderately, from 63% for the oldest cohort (born in 1942 and hence aged 25 in 1967) to 70% for the younger one (aged 25 in 1989). Most of the gains occur for the older cohorts, with little additional progress observed for cohorts entering the labour market after 1979. In the US, in contrast, the oldest cohorts exhibit a much lower ratio, at 40% of male earnings, that climbs rapidly to 58% for the youngest one (Guvenen et al. 2022). Despite this rapid increase in the earnings ratio in the US, it still falls short of that observed in France. For the youngest comparable cohort (those aged 25 in 1983), the US female-to-male lifetime-earnings ratio is about ten percentage points lower than the French one.
Figure 1 Lifetime earnings of women relative to men’s
Notes: Ratio of female to male median lifetime earnings, for cohorts entering the labour market (i.e. aged 25) between 1967 and 1987. The blue line denotes our results for France, the red line for the US (from Guvenen et al. 2022).
Why, then, has gender convergence stalled in France? The stumbling block is working time. While the average number of years worked has increased for both women and men, implying a modest convergence, French women have become increasingly concentrated in part-time jobs.
Anatomy of the gap
When gender differences in lifetime earnings are decomposed, accounting for working time, education, and other observable factors, working time emerges as the key factor.
Figure 2 reports a decomposition of the gender gap in lifetime earnings for successive cohorts. The evolution of the unexplained component, which shrinks from 60% to roughly 20–30% of the overall gap, suggests that social and institutional changes have played a central role, most notably anti-discrimination legislation (in particular, equal-pay provisions) and shifting attitudes toward occupational access and promotion prospects ( Meurs and Pora 2019).
The second key feature concerns working time. For the oldest cohort, differences in working time over the career account for 28% of the explained component of the gap; by the youngest cohort that share has risen to 77%. Over the same cohorts, differences in education and occupation never account for more than 12% of the gap. In other words, the composition of the female workforce has become strikingly similar to the male one but the volume of work has grown apart. Notably, the increase in years worked by women over the course of their careers across cohorts was exclusively in part-time employment, suggesting that the rise in women’s labour force participation has not been a source of convergence in France.
Figure 2 Decomposition of the gender gap in lifetime earnings
U-shaped versus J-shaped gender lifetime earnings gaps
The lifetime earnings gap is not uniform across the earnings distribution. A descriptive decomposition by percentiles (Figure 3) shows a distinctive U-shape for France: disparities are smallest around the 70ᵗʰpercentile and largest at both tails. However, the large gender gap in lifetime earnings observed at the very top and at the very bottom fall sharply for the youngest cohorts, and this decline is more pronounced at the top than at the bottom of the distribution. These patterns contrast markedly with those in the US, where the gap is J-shaped, with the gap being smallest at the bottom of the distribution.
Our decompositions reveal multiple mechanisms affecting gender convergence in lifetime earnings in France. At the bottom, the minimum wage narrows disparities, while working time remains the main gender gap driver. At the top, a persistent unexplained component is consistent with a weakened, but still present, glass ceiling.
Figure 3 Gender ratios in lifetime earnings along the distribution
a) France
b) United States
Sources: Garbinti et al. (2025) for France and Guvenen et al. (2022) for the US.
How country-specific characteristics shape gender earning differences
Compared to France, the gender lifetime earnings gap is both wider and has narrowed more rapidly in the US. What could explain these differences?
Firm-specific wage premiums are an important source of wage inequality, and between-firm sorting can explain part of the gender wage gap, as women tend to work in lower-paying firms. Cross-country differences in wage inequality often stem from institutional factors, particularly wage-setting mechanisms. In France, centralised wage-setting (via a strong minimum wage and industry-wide bargaining) has maintained relatively high wage floors over time, benefiting women who are over-represented at the bottom and reducing the gender gap. In contrast, the US minimum wage has declined in real terms.
Cultural norms, legal frameworks on gender equality (Bailey et al. 2024, Doepke et al. 2025), the motherhood penalty, and gendered returns to education may also shape national patterns in the gender wage gap.
Labour force participation also matters. In both countries, women’s participation and lifetime work years increased. In France, this rise came mostly through part-time work, limiting earnings growth. Early cohorts of French working women were relatively well-educated and high-earning, while in the US, employed women initially had less favourable profiles than non-employed ones, but this reversed as more educated, career-driven women entered the labour market (Mulligan and Rubinstein 2008). This may explain why France shows higher but more stagnant female lifetime earnings than the US.
Three policy levers: Time, taxes, and transparency
How can France reduce its lifetime gender–earnings gap? Two key factors stand out: a large unexplained component and the strong gender divide in part-time work.
The unexplained component likely reflects unequal promotion or job access. While the EU Pay-Transparency Directive mandates reporting for large firms, simpler, annual reports from smaller firms have been found to shrink the gender gap and boosts female promotions (Bennedsen et al. 2020). Moreover, the French reporting system (the “Professional Equality Index”), while seemingly ambitious, faces low compliance, lacks transparency, and underestimates the gap (Breda et al. 2020). Mandating annual disclosure of simple and transparent measures (e.g. mean and median pay gaps) from smaller firms (e.g. 35 employees, as in Denmark), along with stronger enforcement, could accelerate progress.
Reversing the accumulation of part-time years among women could require tackling the structural incentives. Expanding access to affordable, high-quality childcare could be one lever. Studies have shown that when costs fall and capacity expands, mothers tend to move from involuntary part-time to full-time employment without harming children’s outcomes (Givord and Marbot 2015, Hermes et al. 2023). Moving towards individual taxation could also help by removing disincentives for second earners (Bierbrauer et al. 2023).
Of course, these targeted reforms are just some examples and, in any case, should be part of a wider strategy to eliminate gender inequalities across the workplace, society, and within households.
Source : VOXeu
