Abstract
Upon becoming mothers, women often experience a wage decline-a "motherhood wage penalty." Recent scholarship suggests the penalty's magnitude differs by educational attainment. Yet education is also predictive of when women have children and how many they have, which can affect the wage penalty's size too. Using fixed-effects models and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, I estimate heterogeneous effects of motherhood by parity and by age at births, considering how these relationships differ by education. For college graduates, first births were associated with a small wage penalty overall, but the penalty was larger for earlier first births and declined with higher ages at first birth. Women who delayed fertility until their mid-thirties reaped a premium. Second and third births were associated with wage penalties. Less educated women instead faced a wage penalty at all births and delaying fertility did not minimize the penalty.
Highlights
Upon becoming mothers, women often experience a wage decline—a “motherhood wage penalty.” Recent scholarship suggests the penalty’s magnitude differs by educational attainment
Differences by education are determined based on the significance of the interaction of bachelor’s degree or more with each motherhood variable in a fully interacted model
Women with a college degree or more experienced a penalty of about half the magnitude, about 4.8 percent (p < 0.10). The difference in these estimates by education is statistically significant only at the 10 percent level, but the difference in magnitude suggests that the transition to motherhood may have represented a smaller shift in women’s wage trajectories for bachelor’s degree holders
Summary
Women often experience a wage decline—a “motherhood wage penalty.” Recent scholarship suggests the penalty’s magnitude differs by educational attainment. Higher-order births compound motherhood’s costs, so if women with more education have fewer children, they may avoid these additional penalties (Kahn, García-Manglano, and Bianchi 2014; Sigle-Rushton and Waldfogel 2007) The combination of these documented patterns would suggest that because highly educated women are more likely to delay fertility and have fewer children, they will have lower wage penalties on average, which could contribute to inequality across women and their families. Using fixed-effects models and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79), I estimate heterogeneous effects of motherhood by parity and the age at first (and later) births, considering how these effects differ for college-educated and non–college-educated women. It may even offset effects running in opposite directions for different groups
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