Underpaying teen babysitters may contribute to the gender wage gap

December 19, 2019 12:21 PM

Female babysitters often make less than male counterparts and are expected to do extra unpaid tasks. The price you pay for a teenage babysitter is often lower per hour than for other jobs often filled by young people, and it could be contributing to the gender wage gap in those workers' adult years, according to researchers. (Link goes to print article that includes the more in-depth “Cost of Living” CBC podcast segment.)
posted by hurdy gurdy girl (36 comments total)

I can't believe those babysitting wages. I made $8-10/hour babysitting in the early 90s. Talk about wage stagnation.
posted by jacquilynne at 12:53 PM on December 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

It's fascinating to see how the numbers are similar and different in Canada and the Netherlands.

To compare with the wages suggested in the first Baby-Sitters Club book (1986): "Martin is deliberately unclear about what the sitters make per hour or how much they pay in weekly dues, but we know that $3 [1986 USD] is apparently enough of Mary Anne’s income that her father thinks spending it on a pizza party is a big deal."

I really wish Ann M. Martin hadn't been so opaque about what the actual earnings of the club members were. I had absolutely no idea what to ask for with my first regular babysitting job, and having any kind of baseline or a few fictional representations of girls negotiating rates would have been hugely helpful.
posted by asperity at 1:14 PM on December 19, 2019 [8 favorites]

Interesting. When I was working in child care I got some (badly needed) extra money from babysitting kids now and them. I understood from the parents, and from other male childcare workers, that men in the industry command a premium (in babysitting and nannying) because there are far more women in it. I'd say there was probably a 30% markup. Beyond that I have no data but thought I'd throw it in there.

Intuitively it makes some sense that the smaller group would carry a premium, but it's harder to say why a parent would choose a male over a female babysitter. There's a lot of gender stuff wrapped up in it for sure — a father would want his son to have a male caretaker for the masculine influence, I guess?

It's more interesting (and infuriating) however that the young women polled here seem to be involved in a race to the bottom of a youth-focused industry never meant to be subject to serious market pressures. Why can't you just pay your babysitter well? Are parents really doing price comparisons and value checks? I understand it's nice to be able to consult trusted reviews and networks (that they would have done in person or via calls anyhow) but the side effect seems to be a rather cutthroat market.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 1:55 PM on December 19, 2019

Interesting. There's got to be so much difference between various babysitting gigs. In some cases it's an occasional "5 hours on Saturday night, parents order pizza for everyone before they leave and then it's Pixar movie time" and in some cases it's "Be here immediately after school 3 weekdays a week, make sure they change clothes, make them eat dinner and help them with their homework."

Dealing with kids should certainly pay more per hour than yard work.
posted by SoberHighland at 2:13 PM on December 19, 2019 [14 favorites]

One of the things they touch on in the article and the podcast is the idea that, because girls are supposed to be nurturing and love children, it’s seen (even unconsciously) as okay to pay them less:

The survey showed "the girls would receive lower pay for their babysitting jobs," says Moldovan, "which might be seen as lesser value -- or not necessarily lesser value, but if you enjoy the job you're doing then the idea is that you don't necessarily have to be paid that much which is very dangerous."

The danger is two fold: first for assuming girls will enjoy babysitting work, likely because society expects them to be more maternal, and second, for paying babysitters less when it may, in fact, be the more demanding job.

"Actually [babysitting] positions fully involve more responsibility than yardwork," said Moldovan, who pointed out that babysitters have been "traditionally undervalued" and that it's difficult to change that mindset.

"You're leaving your child with this person, not just your grass."

I see this reflected in the way Canadian and American society talks about teachers who strike for better pay and working conditions—they’re not supposed to agitate for better pay because it’s seen as offensive to consider money when working with children. They’re supposed to do it out of love and a commitment to education. It’s even worse for daycare workers and preschool teachers.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 2:14 PM on December 19, 2019 [29 favorites]

I worked as a nanny the summer I was 14. This was the late 1980s. I was with two kids aged 5 and 7, for 9 hours a day, 5 days a week, and was paid $25 a day. I was a responsible, conscientious teenager who tried to do creative, fun, educational stuff with the kids—I only let them watch one hour of TV a day, and only that much because I felt overwhelmed by noon and needed a break from the constant interaction.

I looked up what the equivalent wage is in 2019 dollars, and it’s $5.25 an hour. Grown ass adults paid me the equivalent of $5.25 an hour to look after their precious children for nine hours a day! Wtf.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 2:21 PM on December 19, 2019 [14 favorites]

I don't think I know anyone who has a teenage babysitter.^*
In our circle, usually children are just dropped at a friend's house if the parents need to be kid-free or, if you are paying, it's usually a student from the college.
Honestly not sure what the pay rate is for them, it would be interesting to find out if it is much higher than for teenagers or if it's basically the same, rounded up.

^* Or a teenage lawn care person either, for that matter. Maybe the kids around here just aren't as enterprising as Canadians.
posted by madajb at 2:30 PM on December 19, 2019

I can't believe those babysitting wages. I made $8-10/hour babysitting in the early 90s. Talk about wage stagnation.

You were paid pretty well - 2X (US) minimum wage, as it was $3.80 and then $5.15 in 1997. We pay (college-aged) babysitters $10 an hour, but I have a niece who is more like a part-time nanny who gets $25 and consequently, even though she has graduated from college, has not gotten a full time job. We have friends with a full-time nanny (free room and board) paid $2500 a month.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:33 PM on December 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

As SoberHighland mentioned, it really varies a great deal between jobs. If you have to deal with a kid all day, you should be getting better than minimum wage, I was definitely underpaid for the few daytime jobs I accepted. But at least when I was a teenager, night time jobs were a good deal. The kids were normally already fed, so you just had to entertain them for a couple of hours, put them to bed, and then you had 3-5 hours where you just hung out on the couch, usually with full access to snacks, and read or did homework. I would have boggled at anyone asking me to do cleaning, at least beyond tidying up behind myself. Daytime jobs were high-responsibility, high-labor, nighttime was high-responsibility, low-labor.

I was terrible about negotiating wages, though. I just stopped taking jobs from people I thought were underpaying me, and there was usually plenty of replacements who were canny enough to pay better. I definitely could have used some education in how to ask for a raise!
posted by tavella at 2:34 PM on December 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

The stagnation in wages for babysitters seems like it might be related to wage stagnation in general. I'd be curious to see a graph of babysitting wages as a percentage of wage earned by the people paying the babysitters. (Are the payers being jerks, or has their wage not actually risen either?)
posted by nat at 2:51 PM on December 19, 2019 [6 favorites]

Intuitively it makes some sense that the smaller group would carry a premium

It sure isn't intuitive to anyone that female programmers|plumbers|chefs carry a premium.
posted by clew at 2:53 PM on December 19, 2019 [57 favorites]

You were paid pretty well - 2X (US) minimum wage, as it was $3.80 and then $5.15 in 1997.

I am Canadian, as are the rates in the article, which is why I felt I could compare them. Minimum wage was a bit under $8 where I lives then but the kind of baby sitting I did paid a little better than a regular no because the jobs were usually short and the pay was always rounded up a bit.
posted by jacquilynne at 3:12 PM on December 19, 2019 [3 favorites]

It sure isn't intuitive to anyone that female programmers|plumbers|chefs carry a premium.

Of course you're quite right. I only mean that it is intuitive that scarcity can increase a thing's value; Obviously there's much more going on (here and in most cases) that turns that intuition on its head.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 3:17 PM on December 19, 2019

There are a lot of unique-in-all-the-senses things on Etsy demonstrating that scarcity need not increase a thing's value at all.

There is way too much reflexive cod-economic well-maybe justification for discrimination.
posted by clew at 4:03 PM on December 19, 2019 [2 favorites]

One factor (a factor that works in conjunction with the fairly obvious sexism) is that the other jobs boys are more likely to do (lawn mowing, snow shoveling) are more likely to be advertised (if only with hand-delivered flyers) or to be recruited doing door-to-door sales. Both of those mean it's easier for young workers to learn the local market rates and to negotiate those rates up front, based on visually-obvious features (such as: this sidewalk is X meters long and shaded, that lawn has a treacherous slope).

If you've already got a baseline wage in mind from working jobs with better access to market rate information, you're more confident about negotiating a wage when you take a babysitting job. You get paid more for your services and you get more experience negotiating pay, which will serve you well in the future.

Sure sucks if your informal youthful work experience was all babysitting, though, right?
posted by asperity at 4:24 PM on December 19, 2019 [2 favorites]

Maybe babysitting kids today are sharing their rates on the internets, and sunshine will help disinfect all those gross corners where the discrimination hides. I sure hope so.
posted by asperity at 4:26 PM on December 19, 2019

There's multiple sides to this problem.

One side: Teenage girls who do babysitting deserve to be paid real-job wages, because it comes with real-job responsibilities and requires real-job level of reliability and skills.

Other side: A single parent making minimum wage can never afford a babysitter. Even two parents making minimum wage aren't likely to have enough left on top of bills to pay someone more than they make an hour (after taxes), so they wind up either having relatives do the work for free, or just not ever doing anything without kid(s) in tow. "Time alone with your spouse" should not be a privilege of the wealthy elite.

Eighty-five per cent of the students working babysitting jobs were girls. Dutch boys, on the other hand, pursued jobs like delivering newspapers, working in stores, supermarkets or restaurants.

Article goes on to say that the girls got paid less, without discussing who's doing the paying - that the boys were hired by companies while the girls were hired by individuals or families, whose income doesn't increase based on how well those girls are doing their jobs.

UBI would go a long way toward fixing this.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 4:27 PM on December 19, 2019 [8 favorites]

I can't believe those babysitting wages. I made $8-10/hour babysitting in the early 90s. Talk about wage stagnation.

Or maybe just different location/class? In the early 90s, I was paid $2-3/hour - but I didn't complain because the only kid I looked after was 9 and spent the whole time watching TV. I was fed dinner and could read in the other room. It felt fair, especially as that's all I did. I was only there to be sure the house didn't burn down / CAS didn't show up.
posted by jb at 5:05 PM on December 19, 2019 [3 favorites]

Notably: I did babysit for a single mother. And I really didn't have to work - no where near as much as doing lawn care.
posted by jb at 5:06 PM on December 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

"Intuitively it makes some sense that the smaller group would carry a premium"

Tell that to women in tech, or black CEOs. Men and boys aren't getting paid more because they're rare, they're getting paid more because of sexism.
posted by spindrifter at 7:08 PM on December 19, 2019 [16 favorites]

In the mid- to late-1980s I was paid around $3/hour. I had no idea what other babysitters earned or how my wages compared to girls doing the same work. I basically never thought to ask, since all my wage negotiations were handled between my parents and the kids' parents -- I just accepted the money at the end of the evening. I only did the easy evening kind of babysitting for friends of my parents, where the most you had to do was make some popcorn and make sure the kids were in bed on time.

I would very much hope that the more serious kind of babysitting/nannying, where you have real responsibilities, would pay more than the casual kind I was doing.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:12 PM on December 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

Or maybe just different location/class?

I did my babysitting in a tiny blue collar town in central BC. I can't imagine we were on the high end of the pay spectrum.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:20 PM on December 19, 2019

I wonder if the landscaping vs childcare disparity is partially due to landscaping being a luxury like a maid service, something you spend on because you value time more than money, and child care as more of necessity. Lawn service buyers are going to self select more to people with disposable income but child care is something that is needed across all social classes.
posted by Ferreous at 8:04 PM on December 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

jacquilynne, I was paid $5 an hour in NB in the early 2000s, for multiple kids. I don't know which of us was the anomaly, but you might have been better paid than you realize.

I hired a sitter back in NB this summer for four hours and she told me that it would be $20. I genuinely didn't know if that was total or per hour since going rate in Tahoe is $20 an hour. I tried to pay her $80 and she wouldn't take it and just said "Oh honey, not in New Brunswick. That would be some expensive ass babysitting!”
posted by carolr at 8:39 PM on December 19, 2019 [6 favorites]

My daughter has talked about doing yard work (she’s only 9, yard work is awhile away) and in my mind, sadly, I thought, “no one will hire you for it.” A teen girl will also get less wages than a teen boy for the yard work.

The article compares the world of freelance teen girl income (babysitting) with the world of freelance teen boy income (yardwork) and makes a few conclusions. One of the most important is that the freelance boy world seems to more naturally lead into regular employment whereas for girls it tends to lead to more ad hoc, woman jobs like underpaid care-taking.

Nobody pretty much ever says to a girl, “I like your initiative, let me open this door of opportunity.” And I could say more cynical things but I won’t.

I’ve thought about how I could teach my daughter to be more mercenary but I have to fight my internal controls that say it’s not nice to be mercenary (even though we expect it of boys).
posted by amanda at 6:37 AM on December 20, 2019 [3 favorites]

In our town, the girl-boy wage divide was really, really pronounced. Because while the girls could babysit (and apparently made decent money doing it though it didn't necessarily feel that way at the time), waitress in the restaurant or cashier in the convenience store, the boys got jobs as lumber sorters in the sawmill, which paid union wages even for teenage casual labourers, or worked as grease monkeys for their fathers' trucking businesses.

It was even more pronounced between women and men, because again, for the most part the men worked union jobs in the saw mill while the women simply didn't work at all. If they did work, their options were pretty much waitress, cashier, baby-sitter. My mother strung together a couple of jobs at the same time and still didn't make enough in a year to have to pay federal income tax.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:02 AM on December 20, 2019 [7 favorites]

So what is the going rate for babysitting, anyway? (If it matters, I'm in the suburbs of Atlanta, and unlike the article I pay in American dollars.) I've been paying our sitters (for "date nights") $60 for four or five hours, so $12-$15 an hour. But our babysitters are generally people in our social circle who could use the money so I'm not sure this is entirely a market transaction.

And our babysitters have generally been in their twenties! The 14-year-old next door has offered but somehow I'm not quite comfortable with this, mostly because I can't help but wonder what happens if there's an emergency and driving needs to happen.

Also I'd probably pay a bit more if the kid was awake the whole time - as tavella pointed out, a nighttime job is lower-labor than a daytime job.
posted by madcaptenor at 7:19 AM on December 20, 2019

Teenagers (and adult sitters around here) take a Red Cross class on babysitting and pediatric first aid. Those kids do that so they can tell people they have the certification and get paid more. In Portland, the accepted minimum seems to be about $10/hour for one kid. Parents with multiples will pay either $10/hr/kid or some other flat rate they've worked out. We have a regular sitter and we sort of worked out to pay by the evening. So, she gets a minimum of $50 these days for the evening. I feel like it's fair - she did give up her evening. If we stay out late, I increase it by $10/hr. But it's really up to your cohort norms.

When I was babysitting age, my mother forced me to charge only about $2.50 or $3/hr. I don't know what the going rate was but once I got a real paying job (I don't even know what, $8/hr maybe as the cashier at a pizza restaurant), I stopped babysitting. Some of the kids I sat and the situations I was in were really terrible.
posted by amanda at 7:33 AM on December 20, 2019

And our babysitters have generally been in their twenties! The 14-year-old next door has offered but somehow I'm not quite comfortable with this, mostly because I can't help but wonder what happens if there's an emergency and driving needs to happen.

Next door, though? Wouldn't they just call their parent over to help? This seems ideal!
posted by amanda at 7:35 AM on December 20, 2019

Next door, though? Wouldn't they just call their parent over to help? This seems ideal!

You're right. And we're on friendly enough terms with her parents that it wouldn't bother me if that happened. (Our neighbors on the other side, though...)
posted by madcaptenor at 7:48 AM on December 20, 2019

Lawn service buyers are going to self select more to people with disposable income but child care is something that is needed across all social classes.

True, but in a place where people have similar outdoor work needs (snow + sidewalks + no governmental sidewalk clearance = snow shoveling required), not everyone is going to have children. I think the higher rates are still partly caused by the ease of marketing the service in bulk, where babysitting jobs are a lot more likely to be referral-based, one at a time. (Also, sexism, but maybe if we work on the other parts we can weaken it enough to defeat it. Sexism has lots of armor points. I think this metaphor is getting away from me.)

For parents paying for babysitting services from youngsters, maybe the most useful thing to do would be to spend a few minutes walking them through pay negotiation. Discuss what you've learned from other parents about rates for babysitting vs. services provided/skill level/experience/difficulty of job. Talk about what you're paying them as a percent of what you earn, if you feel comfortable doing that. Make it clear that they're allowed to discuss work terms with you. Try not to let the conversation stop at an embarrassed "oh that sounds fine and anything you need me to do is OK!"

The actual money obviously matters, but the experience talking about money and labor might matter more in the long run. And the education part doesn't cost employers anything but time. (Admittedly in short supply and awkward as hell, but could be worth it.)
posted by asperity at 8:36 AM on December 20, 2019

Market rate for regular babysitters where I am is about $20 per hour. The rate for teens / high schoolers is lower, but that's primarily because (as mentioned earlier) they can't drive kids anywhere and have other limitations on availability - you have to drive them home at the end of the night, etc. Unless there's a teen that lives on your street, there's really no reason to choose a teen babysitter over an adult - so the teens have to compete on price. One positive side is that they can enter the labor market earlier than most jobs; kids can start babysitting as early as 11 or 12 in the right situation (live close by, parents near in case of emergency, the kids being watched are in the early elementary school range, etc).

I think that lawn care or snow shoveling feels different. If the teen takes the same amount of time to do the job and gets themselves from place to place, they don't have to undercut the market rate to get work and can compete on quality and reliability. If they don't have the same equipment and take longer, they are taking a below market rate - much like the teen sitter. If you pay a teen to shovel your driveway it might take them 2 hours, but a guy with a plow truck can get it done in 15 minutes. In that case the teen is accepting a lower hourly rate than the market, but from the customer perspective the end result is the same.

The difference is that the person doing the lawn care / snow shovel job is in control of whether they make more money - at the end of the day the customer is paying for a job, if the job is done faster they can charge a higher hourly rate. That leads to opportunities like starting a company, investing in upgraded equipment, etc. The babysitter can't do that; all they can do is 'upgrade' their skills, and in the world of babysitting that means either things they can't control or take time; like a drivers license, or CPR certification, or lifeguard training, or a high school or college degree.
posted by true at 10:13 AM on December 20, 2019

Wow. I never had children so I have no experience of it from the parent side. But from age 12 to 16, I babysat at least three nights a week during the school year, and 50+ hours a week, days, during summer vacation. This was in rural USA in the early 80s and the minimum wage at the time was $3.35. As a babysitter I rarely earned more than $1/hour and I never got more for additional kids. I was mostly happy to play with the kids, but I liked the multiple-kid jobs better since only kids were harder to amuse. The night gigs paid the same but the kids would go to sleep and I could watch whatever I wanted on TV - better than home where we had no cable and the choice of channel on our one TV was hotly contested.

At 17 I got a formal job in food service and made the minimum wage. It was fewer hours and you had to pay taxes, but it felt like a gravy train compared to babysitting.

Anyways I am amazed to hear what others were paid and have paid out.
posted by elizilla at 10:26 AM on December 20, 2019 [1 favorite]

There's got to be so much difference between various babysitting gigs. In some cases it's an occasional "5 hours on Saturday night, parents order pizza for everyone before they leave and then it's Pixar movie time" and in some cases it's "Be here immediately after school 3 weekdays a week, make sure they change clothes, make them eat dinner and help them with their homework."

The first case is babysitting. The second case is nannying. The latter should absolutely pay more than the former, and both should absolutely pay more than they usually do.
posted by Dysk at 2:53 PM on December 20, 2019 [3 favorites]

amanda, does your daughter know plants enough to be able to weed? Because I suspect you can sell Nurturing Plant Knowledge as feminine, and gardening rather than landscaping is a different market, and she would get to work outside. It might be too expensive for people to buy, though.
posted by clew at 1:21 PM on December 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

In the early 2000s I hired a mother's helper and at our first meeting I told her I'd pay US$15 an hour. The look on her face made it clear this was much more than she was planning on asking for. This woman was an adult, had raised kids of her own, and was studying to be a teacher. I wonder how little the other people she worked for paid.
posted by The corpse in the library at 8:28 AM on December 23, 2019 [1 favorite]