Children and Gender Inequality: Evidence from Denmark

By H. Kleven, Camille Landais, J. Søgaard. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2019

1,091 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Using Danish administrative data, we study the impacts of children on gender inequality in the labor market. The arrival of children creates a long-run gender gap in earnings of around 20 percent driven by hours worked, participation, and wage rates. We identify mechanisms driving these “child penalties” in terms of occupation, sector, and firm choices. We find that the fraction of gender inequality caused by child penalties has featured a dramatic increase over the last three to four decades. Finally, we show that child penalties are transmitted through generations, from parents to daughters, suggesting an influence of childhood environment on gender identity. (JEL D63, J13, J16, J22, J31, J71)

Subfields: Gender Studies, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0999adbf839bc4c5bb2411940b6c32491be7e4dc

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Citations in the corpus

The Impact of COVID-19 on Gender Equality (2020, background): “4See, for example, Kleven, Landais, and Søgaard (2019), Kleven et al. (2019), and Gallen (2018).”
Exposure to More Female Peers Widens the Gender Gap in STEM Participation (2020, background): “Alternatively, if the high school gender composition directly affects fertility preferences, then part of the documented effects on the gender wage gap could be because having children reduces earnings for women (Kleven et al. 2018; Lundborg et al. 2017).”
Gender Inequality and Economic Development: Fertility, Education and Norms (2017, neutral): “While these studies focus on correlations between mothers and daughters-in-law, Kleven et al. (2016) find evidence of intergenerational transmission directly between mothers and daughters.”
Do Firms Respond to Gender Pay Gap Transparency? (2019, neutral): “For example, Mueller et al. (2017) find that firms with higher pay inequality exhibit larger equity returns suggesting that differences in pay inequality across firms are a reflection of differences in managerial talent.”
The Mommy Effect: Do Women Anticipate the Employment Effects of Motherhood? (2018, positive): “Figure 1 very closely parallels the results in Kleven et al. (2018), which uses Danish register data drawing from the 1955-1973 birth cohorts.”
From Mancession to Shecession: Women’s Employment in Regular and Pandemic Recessions (2021, background): “In contrast, after having a child, the earnings of mothers stall, whereas fathers continue climbing the career ladder (e.g., Miller 2011; Adda, Dustmann, and Stevens 2017; Gallen 2018; Kleven, Landais, and Søgaard 2019; Kleven et al. 2019).”
Estimating dynamic treatment effects in event studies with heterogeneous treatment effects (2018, methodology): “To estimate the treatment effects in an event study framework, researchers often use linear fixed effects (FE) regressions (Chetty et al. 2014; Finkelstein et al. 2017; Kline et al. 2017; Kleven et al. 2018; Zwick 2018).”
Maternity and Family Leave Policy (2017, neutral): “A large body of research has documented a persistent “motherhood wage penalty” that can last 10 to 20 years after childbirth—mothers earn lower wages, work fewer hours, and are less likely to be employed than fathers or childless women and men (see, e.g.: Waldfogel, 1998; Lundberg and Rose, 2000; Bl”
Gender Differences in Job Search: Trading off COMMUTE AGAINST WAGE* (2020, background): “, 2010; Goldin, 2014) and the so-called child penalty (e.g., Adda et al., 2017; Kleven et al., 2018).”
Gender gaps and the structure of local labor markets (2020, background): “A few studies have shown that childless women have similar earning trajectories to men, but parenthood drives sizable and persistent gaps in the employment rates, working hours and earnings of mothers and fathers (see Adda et al, 2017; Angelov et al, 2016; Kleven et al, 2019a,b).”
Gender in the Twenty-First Century (2020, methodology): “Some of the most compelling evidence of the crucial role children play in explaining the remaining gender gaps in labor market outcomes in developed countries has been produced over the past few years (see, in particular, Angelov, Johansson, and Lindahl 2016; Kleven, Landais, and Søgaard 2019).”
Gender gaps in labor informality: The motherhood effect (2019, methodology): “(24)For instance, the effect of motherhood on employment for Chile is similar to that of Denmark (Kleven et al., 2019b; Berniell et al., 2020), while family policies—job-protected leave and public provision of child care—are much more generous in the latter.”
Children and the Remaining Gender Gaps in the Labor Market (2020, neutral): “As discussed in Kleven et al. (2019a), the emphasis of the dynamic decomposition exercise is on 1There is an earlier literature that examines the effects of parenthood on wages using cross-sectional and fixed effects models.”