Is motherhood bad for women's careers? Conventional wisdom says "yes," but a new study suggests "maybe not."
The research comes from the IZA—Institute of Labor Economics, a German think tank seeking "to bridge the divide between science and society through science communication and evidence-based policy advice." In an April paper titled "Is There Really a Child Penalty in the Long Run? New Evidence from IVF Treatments," economists Petter Lundborg, Erik Plug, and Astrid Würtz Rasmussen complicate the picture of what happens to women's earnings after having kids.
On average, women in the study did experience a short-term "motherhood penalty" after giving birth. But within a decade, their earnings rebounded. Researchers even found evidence of a small motherhood premium in the long run. Among other limitations, most research on motherhood penalties focuses on the short term, note Lundborg and colleagues.
The researchers analyzed data on more than 18,500 Danish women who had undergone in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments. Specifically, they compared economic outcomes for women whose initial treatment was successful (meaning they conceived) and those whose initial treatment was not. The data covered women who underwent IVF for the first time between 1994 and 2005 and followed these women—and their partners—for up to 25 years.
Some of their findings align with conventional wisdom. Women experienced "a large child penalty shortly after the birth of the first child," and this was not matched by a corresponding impact on the earnings of new fathers. But they also found "that this penalty fades out over time, with mothers eventually catching up to their childless counterparts."
Two years after IVF, "successfully treated women already begin to recover; 10 years later, successfully treated women are fully recovered and earn as much as their unsuccessfully treated counterparts; and from that point onwards, the successfully treated women earn as much as (if not more than)…unsuccessfully treated women," explains the IZA paper.
By 15 years after IVF, the child penalty had turned into a small child premium, with motherhood leading "to a small rise in lifetime female earnings cycle of 2-3 percent."
The findings "suggest that children contribute little to nothing to the persistent gender gap in earnings," the researchers conclude.
The motherhood penalty has been a staple of feminist concerns for more than a decade. The phenomenon, documented in an array of scientific studies, describes women's wages stagnating or declining after they have children. Men, in contrast, see an earnings boost after procreating.
"The motherhood penalty is the price women pay for growing their families while they're in the workforce," claims Fortune magazine. Due to this penalty, "even full-time employed mothers make 71 cents for every dollar made by a father," according to the American Association of University Women.
The IZA research may have personal and political ramifications. Discourse related to family policies and women's wages tends to "take the career costs of children as a mere fact," the researchers point out. Proposals surrounding things such as government-subsidized child care and guaranteed parental leave often take this as a given. How might the discussion look different if this wasn't the case?
It would be a mistake to extrapolate too much from this one study. While large and well-structured, it analyzed a very specific population. And while the authors did consider confounding factors—such as the fact that women who seek IVF "are, on average, richer, more educated, and older when they have their first child"—it's unclear to what extent the findings here universalize.
Still, this does represent a blow to the idea of a long-term and across-the-board motherhood penalty. And it matches up with a burgeoning body of research suggesting the same thing.
Sharon Sassler, a professor of public policy and sociology at Cornell University, researched the supposed motherhood penalty as it applied to women working in computer science. These mothers "receive both a marriage and parenthood premium relative to unmarried or childless women," according to Sassler's 2023 paper, titled "Factors Shaping the Gender Wage Gap Among College-Educated Computer Science Workers." However, the premium was "significantly smaller than the bonus that married men and fathers receive over their childless and unmarried peers."
And a 2016 study published in The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences found that between 1960 and 2010, the family wage gap (the wage difference between parents and the childless) declined for women regardless of occupation, while disappearing entirely for women in business and postsecondary education. Meanwhile, "a positive wage differential emerged in STEM, medicine, and law."
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