The Wage Penalty for Motherhood

By Michelle J. Budig, P. England. American Sociological Review, 2001

2,063 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Motherhood is associated with lower hourly pay, but the causes of this are not well understood. Mothers may earn less than other women because having children causes them to (1) lose job experience, (2) be less productive at work, (3) trade off higher wages for mother-friendly jobs, or (4) be discriminated against by employers. Or the relationship may be spurious rather than causal—women with lower earning potential may have children at relatively higher rates. The authors use data from the 1982–1993 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth with fixed-effects models to examine the wage penalty for motherhood. Results show a wage penalty of 7 percent per child. Penalties are larger for married women than for unmarried women. Women with (more) children have fewer years of job experience, and after controlling for experience a penalty of 5 percent per child remains. “Mother-friendly” characteristics of the jobs held by mothers explain little of the penalty beyond the tendency of more mothers than non-mothers to work part-time. The portion of the motherhood penalty unexplained probably results from the effect of motherhood on productivity and/or from discrimination by employers against mothers. While the benefits of mothering diffuse widely—to the employers, neighbors, friends, spouses, and children of the adults who received the mothering—the costs of child rearing are borne disproportionately by mothers.

Subfields: Demography, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/79609db75b69a8282cd3fb1dfafad7973a9fbcab

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Citations in the corpus

THE WEALTH OF SINGLE WOMEN: MARITAL STATUS AND PARENTHOOD IN THE ASSET ACCUMULATION OF YOUNG BABY BOOMERS IN THE UNITED STATES (2006, neutral): “Smock 1991 ; Waldfogel 1997 , 1998 ; Michelle Budig and Paula England 2002 ).”
Is There a Male Marital Wage Premium? New Evidence from the United States (2018, background): “Second, the MWP would, to some degree, counterbalance the wage penalty associated with motherhood (see Budig and England 2001; Gough and Noonan 2013), thereby increasing family welfare and fertility.”
Fathers and the Flexibility Stigma (2013, positive): “Similarly, Budig and England (2001) find a wage penalty of 7% per child for mothers, without controlling for work experience, and a 5% penalty after controlling for work experience, with little evidence that women of different skill levels experience differential wage penalties.”
Flexible Working and the Gender Pay Gap in the Accountancy Profession (2004, background): “These include women being less well qualified, occupational sex segregation with women being clustered in lower paid professions (Grimshaw and Rubery, 2001), women being mothers (Budig and England, 2001), the number of women in part-time employment (Joshi and Paci, 1998), and overt discrimination (H”
Overwork and the Slow Convergence in the Gender Gap in Wages (2014, methodology): “Wages are adjusted for inflation using the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s Personal Consumption Expenditures Deflator and expressed in 2004 dollars.”
“The Motherhood Wage Gap for Women in the United States: The Importance of College and Fertility Delay” (2005, methodology): “28 We also estimated our models including information on the total number of children and the results were very similar to those in the previous literature (see, for example, Budig and England (2001)). childbearing.”
Explaining the Gender Gap in Help to Parents: The Importance of Employment (2004, background): “One explanation would be that helping parents creates a wage penalty for both women and men, very similar to the wage penalty found for mothering (see Budig & England, 2001; Waldfogel, 1997); it also reduces women’s opportunity (or desire) to be self-employed.”
Has the Price of Motherhood Declined Over Time? A Cross‐Cohort Comparison of the Motherhood Wage Penalty (2003, methodology): “…one that focuses on a later cohort of women entering the labor force in the 1980s (i.e., the NLSY), suggests the motherhood penalty to be roughly 7% per child, or 5% for one child and 10% for two children, net of various factors that may affect earnings (Budig & England, 2001; Waldfogel, 1997a).”
Does bad pay cause occupations to feminize, Does feminization reduce pay, and How can we tell with longitudinal data? (2007, background): “Individual fixed-effects models have also cast doubt on the claim that female occupations are more mother friendly; Budig and England (2001) find no evidence that the wage penalty for motherhood is explained by mothers disproportionately working in female occupations.”
Gender, Flexibility Stigma and the Perceived Negative Consequences of Flexible Working in the UK (2018, background): “This is one of the major reasons why women suffer from a penalty in their pay/career when they become mothers—i.e., the motherhood penalty (Budig and England 2001).”