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This spring, a European study came out with the provocative conclusion that having children contributes “little to nothing” to the persistent gap in earnings between men and women.
The study caught my attention because I know the threat of earning less as a parent has had a chilling effect on people in my generation considering starting families. Last year, while I was reporting on motherhood dread in the US, young women told me they feared having kids would mean they’d be penalized in the workplace, affecting their financial security and opportunities. Meanwhile, the media does little to allay that concern: “One of the worst career moves a woman can make is to have children,” the New York Times once declared.
But while these economists found that Danish women who used in vitro fertilization experienced a large earnings penalty right after the birth of their first child, over the course of their careers, this penalty faded out. Eventually, the mothers even benefitted from a child premium compared to women who were not initially successful with IVF.
In other words, the so-called “motherhood penalty” that says women pay a price in the workplace for becoming moms might be less severe than previously thought.
“As children grow older and demand less care, we see that the mother’s earnings start to recover, with much of the immediate penalties made up 10 years after the birth of the first child,” the researchers wrote.
What makes this new European research so notable is that it relies on the same high-quality data that has informed previous studies on the motherhood penalty (including one Vox covered in 2018) but used an even broader sample and an approach the authors argue is better suited for long-term conclusions.
This wasn’t the first time I’d seen research that complicates our understanding of the motherhood penalty. After the essay on motherhood dread was published, I heard from Sharon Sassler, a Cornell University sociologist who studies relationships and gender.
She had recently published a paper on gender wage gaps in the computer science field and found that mothers in computer science actually earned more than childless women (though this “wage premium” was significantly less than what fathers earned).
“It was difficult for me to find a home for the attached article because reviewers cannot fathom that mothers might out-earn single women, though there is a growing body of evidence that [they] do,” she wrote in her email to me. “It might be selection [bias] … but given that folks have found this across disciplines suggests that the motherhood penalty really needs to be reassessed.”
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