ABSTRACT The motherhood penalty is often understood as a salary differential between mothers and non-mothers. We use an original survey of academic women in the UK to understand whether the motherhood penalty extends to other dimensions of a woman's career and experience in the workplace. We explore these penalties via an original survey of academic women in the UK. Becoming a mother, we show, has no effect on salary, but slows down career progression. Mothers report higher levels of job satisfaction yet indicate heightened perceptions of gendered salary unfairness. We then explore several factors potentially mitigating the motherhood penalties. On the formal side, more generous maternity provisions are associated with higher salaries, and longer childcare hours facilitate career progression. On the informal side, a sympathetic Head of Department boosts job satisfaction. At home, having a supportive partner plays a key role in mothers' professional success. Our paper highlights the varied penalties mothers encounter even in a highly skilled profession, and the necessity of a multi-faceted policy response.

Motherhood penalty refers to the negative impact of maternity on women’s career, which implicates the inferior status of women in labor market. To improve women’s situation in labor market participation, multiple social support measures should be introduced including sharing childcare responsibility and career sustaining to help mothers achieve a work-family balance. This study aims to systematically review and analyze the social practice applied to support mothers’ labor force participation. By adopting a scoping review method, this study uses Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar as the main database in searching for relevant articles. The thematic analysis uncovers the constitution of current social support system for mothers’ labor market participation, which crosses the public and private sphere, as well as its multiple functions, which potentially provide framework for future research in this topic related fields.

ABSTRACT Low fertility and population ageing have prompted renewed attention to pronatalist social policy, yet evidence on its effectiveness in East Asia remains limited. This article investigates the impact of pronatalist policy interventions on childbearing intentions in China, using a factorial survey experiment conducted in Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning province, emblematic of the country's demographic crisis. We examine three policy domains, including decommodification, defamilisation, and degenderisation, alongside context‐specific familisation risks. A core contribution is a gendered interaction analysis revealing that women and men respond to fundamentally different policy logics. Women's intentions are most positively shaped by decommodification measures that provide direct financial compensation for care work, directly offsetting the motherhood penalty. In stark contrast, men's responsiveness is contingent on structural security (notably housing), a prerequisite for engaging with family policies, while they remain largely insensitive to marginal financial incentives. Beyond this gendered dichotomy, we find that while public childcare expansion paradoxically reduced intentions—likely reflecting quality concerns—universal work‐life balance and gender equality measures proved effective for both genders. Furthermore, the strong positive effects of intergenerational support and homeownership highlight the critical role of ‘supported familisation’ in the Chinese context. The study concludes that effective pronatalist strategies must move beyond ‘one‐size‐fits‐all’ instruments to explicitly synchronise resource substitution for women with structural security for men, underpinned by universal measures to degenderise time.

Purpose This paper examines the extent of perceived workplace discrimination among childless employees and investigates how individual characteristics and workplace conditions may influence this perception. It also explores how widely discussed concepts, such as the motherhood penalty and fatherhood premium, shape perceptions of workplace discrimination among individuals without children. Design/methodology/approach To analyze perceived discrimination, data from the European Working Conditions Survey conducted by Eurofound was used. The analysis included responses from 54,401 individuals from 36 European countries. Descriptive statistics were used to compare perceptions of discrimination between childless employees and parents, while linear logistic regression was used to investigate how being childless intersects with other individual characteristics and workplace conditions. Findings The results reveal that, while no significant differences were found between childless individuals and parents at the general level across both genders, differences emerged when an intersectionality approach is applied. These differences were particularly evident across age groups. Childless individuals in different age groups also experience workplace discrimination, though the sources may differ from those affecting employees with children. Additionally, organizational position among men and women and family situation played a significant role in the frequency of perceived discrimination among childless employees. Caregiving status also significantly predicted perceived discrimination, especially among men. Practical implications This study highlights the importance of designing HR policies that are inclusive of all employee groups. Family-friendly policies, if not carefully implemented, may unintentionally marginalize childless employees. Complementary initiatives aimed at fostering a single-friendly culture could mitigate this effect. Originality/value This paper contributes to the growing field of research on workplace discrimination by addressing the underexplored issue of discrimination perceived by childless employees, offering the comparison with parents through an intersectional lens.

The paper discusses the results of a simulation study of the motherhood penalty that leads to lower pensions for women in defined contribution pension systems. The study uses a hybrid simulation model that combines forecasting demographic changes with modeling pension capital accumulation. The models were built using numerical simulation methods, i.e. discrete event simulation and system dynamics, and then fed with real data from 2000 to 2023. The demographic model forecasts the size of age-gender cohorts over a multi-decade horizon, allowing us to forecast the size of the working-age population which, in turn, is the basis for estimating the amount of pension contribution premiums. The annual amount of premiums written determines the values of indexes of pension capital accumulated in individual pension accounts. The simulation model monitors various women’s careers from the time they start working at age 25 until retirement. The simulation experiments are designed to study the causes of the motherhood penalty and determine the amount of the penalty under different scenarios of a woman’s career. The results show that the pension of a woman deciding to have one child will be lower than that of a childless woman by about 25%. For a woman raising two children, the difference drops to about 40%.

Purpose This study critically examines how gender inequalities manifest in performance evaluations within professional workplaces. While initially focused on whether and how women's evaluations change after maternity, the review broadens to gendered mechanisms more generally, with sustained attention to motherhood-related dynamics such as flexibility stigma, ideal-worker norms and care responsibilities. By synthesizing 54 empirical studies published between 2009 and 2024, the paper identifies structural and interactional processes that reproduce inequalities, evaluates the evidence on motherhood penalties, and highlights gaps in longitudinal and sectoral coverage to guide future research. Design/methodology/approach The review followed PRISMA 2020 guidelines to ensure transparency and replicability. Searches were conducted in Scopus and Web of Science (2009–2024) using “performance evaluation,” “gender,” and “work,” restricted to English and Italian publications in the social sciences, management and economics. Only empirical studies addressing individual evaluations in hierarchical workplaces were included; exclusions covered non-hierarchical, clinical, or educational contexts and studies lacking a gender perspective. After screening 1,005 records and applying eligibility criteria, 54 studies were retained. An inductive coding process identified five recurrent themes structuring the synthesis. Findings The review shows that performance evaluations, though formally gender-neutral, consistently reproduce inequalities. Bias enters at multiple levels: criteria setting and managerial incentives, organizational practices shaped by ideal-worker norms, evaluation tools and rating scales, and socio-demographic dynamics in evaluator–evaluatee interactions. Mothers face distinctive penalties through flexibility stigma, time norms and stereotype-driven interpretations of behavior and feedback. Evidence on pre-/post-maternity evaluations remains scarce, limiting causal generalizability. Overall, the findings underscore that motherhood penalties constitute a distinct structural pathway of disadvantage, requiring targeted research and policy interventions. Research limitations/implications The review is limited to peer-reviewed empirical studies published in English between 2009 and 2024, potentially excluding relevant insights from grey literature or non-English contexts. Most included studies are based in Western countries, raising concerns about global generalizability. Future research should expand geographical coverage and investigate intersectional dimensions more systematically. Practical implications Organizations should critically assess the design and implementation of performance evaluation tools to mitigate embedded gender biases. Practices such as structured feedback, joint evaluations and transparency in promotion decisions may reduce disparities. HR departments must also be aware of how motherhood and care responsibilities are systematically penalized in current systems. Social implications Gender-biased performance evaluations contribute to systemic inequalities in income, career advancement and job security. This review underscores the need for more inclusive evaluation frameworks that recognize diverse forms of labor and challenge masculine norms embedded in organizational practices, particularly in relation to care and work-life balance. Originality/value This paper provides the first systematic review synthesizing empirical evidence on gender inequalities in performance evaluation with explicit attention to motherhood. By integrating 54 studies across sociology, psychology, management and economics, it highlights how structural, cultural and interactional mechanisms converge to produce persistent disparities. The focus on motherhood penalties—ideal-worker time norms, flexibility stigma and stereotype-driven feedback—advances understanding beyond general gender bias. The review also identifies key blind spots, including limited longitudinal evidence and sectoral coverage, offering a comprehensive agenda for future research and practical implications for equitable evaluation systems.

ABSTRACT This study examines the prospective motherhood penalty encountered by women white‐collar workers of childbearing age, regardless of their childbearing status, in China's non‐state‐owned enterprises. Drawing on 63 qualitative interviews with women employees, selected from a broader study of 85 participants, it explores how women subjectively experience, emotionally negotiate, and strategically respond to anticipated discrimination based on reproductive potential. I introduce the concept of the Career‐Fertility Countdown—a socially constructed and culturally enforced temporal regime that compresses women's career advancement and childbearing into a narrow window of acceptability. To navigate these multifaceted pressures, women adopt diverse strategies: those intending to have children engage in strategic timing and planning, whereas those determined to remain childfree—particularly lesbian women—engage in strategic gender performance and identity signaling. The Career‐Fertility Countdown framework highlights how time, gender, and organizational expectations interact to shape embodied pressures and identity strategies, particularly under China's overwork‐intensive and ageist labor regime. Drawing on narratives from women of varied backgrounds, this study contributes to feminist understandings of how reproductive timelines are internalized and negotiated in competitive workplaces, where prospective motherhood becomes a source of precariousness for all women. The findings also emphasize the importance of incorporating age‐related cultural paradigms when studying women's barriers in the workplace. Such paradigms may exacerbate tensions between work and family aspirations and amplify gender discrimination for women at particular career stages.

Abstract Current research suggests that the motherhood penalty, resulting from the traditional gender division of labor, negatively affects women’s labor force participation and compensation. However, with the development of the economy and the diversification of occupational types, women may leverage the abundant resources available to them to start businesses, achieve a work-family balance, and ensure career sustainability. If this possibility is confirmed, it could demonstrate the promoting effect of child care on urban women’s transition from employment to entrepreneurship and reveal policy interventions that might enhance both fertility and employment rates. Based on the data from the 2022 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this paper confirms that the number of children under the age of 16 positively influences women’s entrepreneurial decision-making in urban China. This effect is mediated by total compensation and is weakened by education level. This study highlights how the motherhood penalty shapes entrepreneurial decisions and provides a foundation for policy support aimed at helping women of childbearing age pursue entrepreneurship. Such policies could enhance women’s fertility intention, boost their labor force participation, and promote sustainable economic and social development.

ABSTRACT Objective This study examines how childbirth affects women's job tasks. Background Motherhood remains a key source of gendered inequalities in the labor market. Yet little is known about how it reshapes women's work content, even though job tasks are critical for job quality, skill development, and long‐term career trajectories. Method Using panel data from the German National Educational Panel Study (2011–2020), we analyze within‐person changes in job tasks following childbirth among 1978 women, applying individual fixed‐effects models. Results After childbirth, mothers engage in fewer analytic, complex, and interactive tasks. These reductions are concentrated among those who decrease their working hours, while no differences emerge by occupational mobility or leave duration. Conclusion The findings support perspectives emphasizing work–family strain rather than explanations based on occupational mobility or length of leave. Implications By documenting task‐based motherhood penalties, this study highlights a critical yet often overlooked dimension of gendered labor market inequality. The results underscore the need for work–family policies and workplace practices that safeguard not only mothers' labor market participation but also their access to career‐enhancing tasks.

Motherhood penalty in consumption

Over the past decades, the gender wage gap has been observed to fall due to women’s better performance in higher education as well as rising labor force participation. However, gender inequalities are still noticeable. Theories related to causes of this gender wage gap have been divided into two categories: the supply-side causes concerning human capital characteristics and the demand-side causes concerning discrimination in the labor market. Regional characteristics associated with variation in the gender wage gap have not had much attention paid to them. Results of this paper show that regions with more well-educated women, higher GDP per capita, more specialized in industries of Health Care and Social Assistance, Accommodation and Food Services, fewer households with childcare needs and lower employment rate are likely to lead to less wage discrimination against female workers. From the perspective of motherhood penalty, regions with a higher demand for childcare is suggested to allow female workers to work flexibly, encourage male workers to take paternity leave with their wives and equip sufficient childcare services for working mothers.

ABSTRACT Objective This paper introduces reproductive curation, the deliberate coordination of reproductive arrangements, as a theoretical framework for examining how legal, institutional, and interpersonal factors interact with technology in shaping reproductive decision‐making, based on interviews with 32 lesbian mothers and mothers‐to‐be in China. Background China does not recognize equal marriage or parental rights, nor does it provide access to assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) for people seeking to have children outside heterosexual marriage. Method Using grounded theory, the study analyzes how participants made decisions about allocating genetic, gestational, and legal motherhood, choosing between two pathways—ROPA (reception of a partner's oocytes) and non‐ROPA—to have children. Results Participants articulated four processes of reproductive curation to achieve four goals: (a) To secure child custody through non‐ROPA or to bind intimate relationships through ROPA; (b) To optimize intergenerational resource transmission by assigning genetic and/or legal motherhood to a partner better positioned within social hierarchies; (c) To mitigate maternal risks and motherhood penalties by assigning gestation based on workplace family policies and embodied capacities for reproductive labor; and (d) To construct alternative foundations of motherhood legitimacy for non‐genetic, non‐legal co‐mothers. Conclusion Although ARTs enable reflexive reproductive decision‐making for people with minoritized sexual orientation globally, their use is shaped by local cultural norms, institutional arrangements, labor market inequalities, and intra‐couple and familial negotiations. Implications The framework explains how individuals in different contexts weigh technological options to overcome barriers and align reproductive roles with available resources and familial aspirations.

Management theories and models aim to predict future states and outcomes. Yet, as management scholars, we often tend to prioritise model fit metrics over prediction and forecasting, assuming that strong model fit inherently leads to accurate predictions. We challenge this assumption, arguing that an exclusive focus on model fit can yield theories that fail to generalise to new datasets, thereby limiting their forecasting accuracy and practical relevance. In a systematic review of 6,514 studies, we find a pronounced dominance of model fit approaches. Model fit metrics are susceptible to overfitting, where models capture noise rather than patterns, and underfitting, where key relationships are overlooked. Both problems undermine predictive performance. Drawing on insights from operations research, we apply newly developed forecasting metrics to address these limitations. Empirically examining the gender gap and motherhood penalty in returns from employment and entrepreneurship, we demonstrate how these metrics can complement traditional fit measures. By integrating multiple assessment metrics, we offer a comprehensive framework for improving both predictive accuracy and theoretical development in management research. We provide the Stata syntax that scholars can download and use to assess the forecasting ability of their models.

Abstract Based on data from the 2016 and 2022 waves of the China family panel studies (CFPS), this study employs unconditional quantile regression and the RIF-Oaxaca decomposition method to systematically examine gender disparities and their evolving mechanisms in the employment quality of young people in China. The findings reveal that young women face significant constraints in accessing high-quality employment, with gender gaps exhibiting a “glass ceiling” pattern characterized by “high-end differentiation.” Decomposition results indicate that this inequality primarily stems from structural inequities in market return mechanisms rather than differences in individual endowments, placing women in a predicament of “high input but low return.” Moreover, marriage and family responsibilities impose a pronounced “motherhood penalty” on women, with heterogeneous effects across the distribution of employment quality. The study underscores that gender inequality in youth employment quality has deep-seated heterogeneity and structural roots. Accordingly, policy interventions should focus on dismantling structural barriers, optimizing return mechanisms, and improving tiered family support policies to effectively promote employment equity and sustainable development among the youth.

Although there are already existing laws aimed at promoting equality, gender discrimination still widely exists in the Chinese workplace. Women face obvious barriers in recruitment, career promotion, pay, and workplace culture. These barriers reflect the economic and cultural bias based on gender that still exists in society. This paper explores this problem through a comparison of legal rules and empirical policy research. The analysis examines the limits of the current Chinese legal system and compares them with the framework of Title VII of the U.S. Civil Rights Act. This study also shows how weak legal institutions and policies combine with cultural factors to make gender inequality continue. This paper then proposes practical measures and policy suggestions to address this problem. This study uses research methods including legal text analysis, case study, and statistical data review, in order to find the patterns and causes of discrimination. The research results show that gender discrimination in the Chinese workplace mainly appears as recruitment bias, motherhood penalty, cultural stereotypes, sexual harassment and objectifying language, and pay gap. Based on these findings, this study proposes several countermeasures. These measures include improving anti-discrimination legislation, strengthening supervision and enforcement mechanisms, increasing corporate responsibility, making family-friendly policies, and promoting cultural change through education and publicity. The research shows that promoting gender equality is not only about fairness and justice, but also helps to improve labor market efficiency and promote sustainable economic growth in China.

This paper investigates the causal effect of motherhood on women's occupational class trajectories-the Motherhood Class Penalty-using data from the 1970 British Cohort Study. We apply sequence optimal matching alongside other matching techniques to construct counterfactual class trajectories for mothers in the UK. Our results show that motherhood significantly increases downward mobility and limits access to professional occupations. Low professional women face an estimated 15% penalty, while high professional women experience a 5% penalty compared to their childless counterparts. We find that professional-class women are more likely to remain attached to the labour market after childbirth, whereas working-class mothers are at greater risk of permanently exiting the workforce. Among all groups, low professional women experience the most significant forgone upward mobility, highlighting how motherhood penalties vary across the class spectrum. These findings stress the substantial human capital loss associated with motherhood in the UK and suggest that occupational penalties are shaped by existing socio-economic hierarchies, potentially reinforcing broader patterns of inequality.

The article examines the income trajectories of women and men in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) in Finland, a country within the Nordic labour market context that strives for gender equality. The study uses total population register data from Finnish STEM degree holders with at least a bachelor’s degree, aged 30–40 years, selecting cohorts born in 1960, 1965, 1970, 1975 and 1980 ( N = 31,865). This study estimates how cohort, becoming a parent, and co-residing with a spouse affect income trajectories for women and men. The findings reveal persistent gender income disparities across cohorts, with economic turbulence potentially widening the differences. The results support the motherhood penalty and, unexpectedly, address a ‘living-alone penalty’ for men. Even with a design examining STEM graduates at the same career stage, gender differences remain significant and are not alleviated by the Nordic welfare state context.

This article examines the growing phenomenon of live-in care in the European Union, with particular focus on services provided by posted workers, including third-country nationals. It situates live-in care within the broader EU socio-legal framework, tracing the evolution of recent policy developments such as the European Pillar of Social Rights, the European Care Strategy, and documents arising therefrom. The article analyses the latest phenomena in cross-border live-in care, including deinstitutionalisation of care, highlighting how person-centred and community-based models are reshaping the field. Special attention is devoted to gender dimensions, including the disproportionate burden on women and the 'daughterhood penalty' and 'motherhood penalty'. By linking legal, economic, and social aspects, the article assesses whether EU policies effectively address current challenges in that regard and their future impact concerning more sustainable care provision.

Since 2008, China’s urban labour market has undergone a series of economic and institutional adjustments, such as the strengthening of labour protection policies, a transition in economic structure, and the relaxation of family planning policies, creating a new context for the gender wage gap. This paper examines the gender wage gap in urban China from 2007 to 2018, and finds that this gap narrowed significantly from 2007 to 2013, but widened again from 2013 to 2018. Our baseline model estimates the gender wage gap at 23.4% in 2007, 21.1% in 2013, and 25.8% in 2018. Using the Heckman two-stage regression to control for the impact of ‘pre-market’ sample selection in market participation decision-making, and using the endogenous switching model to control for the impact of ‘within-market’ selection in marriage and childbirth decisions, the paper finds the persistent U-shaped trend in gender wage gap across the observation years, while the gap in other estimation models was larger for 2007 and 2018. Marriage and childbearing are important drivers of the gender wage gap. A key finding is that following the relaxation of the one-child policy, the ‘motherhood penalty’ intensified. In 2018, the young and highly educated women faced the most severe wage penalties associated with childbirth, highlighting the unintended consequences of the new policy when corresponding social support was inadequate.

This data visualization examines the relationship between motherhood earnings penalties and gender earnings gaps across local labor markets in France and Germany. Drawing on harmonized administrative data, the authors document a strong positive association: regions with larger motherhood penalties tend to exhibit wider gender earnings gaps. This pattern holds across all Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics second-division regions, where a 1 percent increase in the motherhood penalty corresponds to a 0.3 percent higher gender earnings gap. The relationship is even stronger within countries, with the average association rising to 0.7 percent. These findings suggest that regional differences in gender earnings inequality are strongly associated with the magnitude of motherhood penalties.