Child Penalties Research Articles

The Child Penalty - What about Job Amenities?

Women with children tend to earn lower hourly wages than women without children - a shortfall known as the 'child penalty'. While many studies provide evidence for this empirical fact and explore several hypotheses about its causes, the impact of motherhood on job dimensions other than wages has scarcely been investigated. In order to assess changes in women's jobs around the time of first childbirth, I use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and apply an event study analysis. The results show not only a significant change in women's hourly wages (-19%) once becoming mothers, but also in other non-pecuniary job characteristics, such as working hours (-15 hours), night work (-6%), work in the evening hours (-8%), stress (-10%), physical requirements (4%), hazards (-3%) and distance to the workplace (-1km). In order to assess the hypothesis that mothers might substitute wages for non-wage benefits, I additionally estimate a hedonic wage regression. The results suggest that mothers trade pecuniary for non-pecuniary job characteristics and hence, that part of the child penalty (8.2%) might be interpreted as a compensating wage differential.

Opting Out? Cohort Differences in Professional Women's Employment Rates from 1960 to 2005

Over the past 50 years, women's roles have changed dramatically—a reality captured by substantial increases in employment and reductions in fertility. Yet, the social organization of work and family life has not changed much, leading to pervasive work-family conflict. Observing these strains, some scholars wonder whether U.S. women's high employment levels are sustainable. Women's employment in professional and managerial occupations—the core of the analyses offered in this article—merits particular interest because of the material and symbolic implications for gender equality. In a cohort analysis of working-age women born between 1906 and 1975, I show that employment levels among college-educated women in professional and managerial occupations have increased across cohorts. Full-time, year-round employment rates continue to rise across cohorts, even among women in historically male professions and mothers of young children. Although labor force participation rates have stopped rising, they have stalled at a very high rate, with less than 8 percent of professional women born since 1956 out of the labor force for a year or more during their prime childbearing years. Moreover, the difference in employment rates between mothers and childless women—the “child penalty”—is shrinking across cohorts.

Does the Gap in Family‐friendly Policies Drive the Family Gap?*

AbstractSegregation of the labour market into a family‐friendly and a non‐family‐friendly sector implies that women self‐select into sectors depending on institutional constraints, preferences for family‐friendly working conditions and expected wage differences. We take this sector dimension into account and find a severe penalty after birth‐related leave in the non‐family‐friendly sector, so that women who would be affected by this penalty self‐select into the family‐friendly sector. The penalty is a combination of a large human‐capital depreciation effect, a child penalty and no recovery.

The Effect of Children on Women's Wages

The author uses data from the 1968-1988 National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women to investigate the lower wages of mothers. In pooled cross-sectional models, difference models, and fixed-effects models, the negative effect of children on women's wages is not entirely explained by differences in labor market experience. He considers two alternative explanations for the residual penalties associated with having children : unobserved pay-relevant differences between mothers and non-mothers, which fixed-effects models show do not account for the child penalty; and part-time employment, which does account for some of the child penalty. However even after controlling for part-time employment, a negative effect of children on women's pay remain

The Effect of Household Structure on Women's Economic Activity and Fertility: Evidence from Recent Mothers in Urban Mexico

This study examines the effect of the presence of a "mother substitute" in the household on urban womens participation in the labor force and fertility in Mexico in 1982. Data were obtained from the 1982 Mexican National Demographic Survey on reproductive history educational status employment status and household structure for a subsample of 2746 urban women who were married (90%) or in a consensual union (10%) and had had a child within the prior 5 years. Theoretically women with higher value of market time lower household income and lower value of nonmarket time will more likely be working women. Women had 3.4 surviving children 83% used contraceptives and 15% were employed. Analysis involved use of reduced form equations to model the joint determination of labor force participation and fertility; justification of this method is given. Husbands education was a proxy for income level. Cost of child rearing is figured as the mothers number of children >5 years and household structure. "Mother substitute" was an additional unemployed female aged >13 years. An imputed wage for all women in the sample is used to measure the value of time in the labor force. Probit regression estimation methods revealed that mothers were more likely to be working when their wage offers were higher. Those with a caretaker in the household and with a less well-educated husband are also more likely to work. Those more likely to be employed also had few children 6-12 years and more children >13 years. In the fully reduced form of the equation determinants of the wage offer (education age region) were substituted for the instrumental variable; the results were consistent. An additional woman in the household was significantly positively related to the likelihood of women working. In the reduced form fertility equation women who were younger better educated with more children and with better educated partners were less likely to have more than 1 child born within the last 5 years. The implication from the negative coefficient of the household-structure variable is that women with additional caretakers are less likely to have more than 1 young child. The causes are explained. Mother substitutes increase the likelihood of working women and do not increase the likelihood of having more children particularly among nonemployed mothers which differs from US results. Future research should refine the measure of mother substitute and account for her presence in the household.

Family Investments in Human Capital: Earnings of Women

It has long been recognized that consumption behavior represents mainly joint household or family decisions rather than separate decisions of family members. Accordingly, the observational units in consumption surveys are "consumer units," that is, households in which income is largely pooled and consumption largely shared. More recent is the recognition that an individual's use of time, and particularly the allocation of time between market and nonmarket activities, is also best understood within the context of the family as a matter of interdependence with needs, activities, and characteristics of other family members. More generally, the family is viewed as an economic unit which shares consumption and allocates production at home and in the market as well as the investments in physical and human capital of its members. In this view, the behavior of the family unit implies a division of labor within it. Broadly speaking, this division of labor or "differentiation of roles" emerges because the attempts to promote family life are necessarily constrained by complementarity and substitution relations in the household production process and by comparative