The Mommy Effect: Do Women Anticipate the Employment Effects of Motherhood?

By I. Kuziemko, Jessica Pan, Jenny Shen, Ebonya L. Washington. 2018

153 citations recorded by the source corpus.

After decades of convergence, the gender gap in employment outcomes has recently plateaued in many rich countries, despite the fact that women have increased their investment in human capital over this period. We propose a hypothesis to reconcile these two trends: that when they are making key human capital decisions, women in modern cohorts underestimate the impact of motherhood on their future labor supply. Using an event-study framework, we show substantial and persistent employment effects of motherhood in U.K. and U.S. data. We then provide evidence that women do not anticipate these effects. Upon becoming parents, women (and especially more educated women) adopt more negative views toward female employment (e.g., they are more likely to say that women working hurts family life), suggesting that motherhood serves as an information shock to their beliefs. Women on average (and, again, more educated women in particular) report that parenthood is harder than they expected. We then look at longer horizons—are young women's expectations about future labor supply correct when they make their key educational decisions? In fact, female high school seniors are increasingly and substantially overestimating the likelihood they will be in the labor market in their thirties, a sharp reversal from previous cohorts who substantially underestimated their future labor supply. Finally, we specify a model of women's choice of educational investment in the face of uncertain employment costs of motherhood, which demonstrates that our results can be reconciled only if these costs increased unexpectedly across generations. We end by documenting a collage of empirical evidence consistent with such a trend.

Subfields: Gender Studies, General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f045475201229eb90728c7fab79305cb1899d7af

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Gender Studies

In General Health Professions

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Child Penalties Across Countries: Evidence and Explanations (2019, background): “The analysis reveals some striking similarities in the qualitative effects of children, but also some sharp 1 See, e.g., Angelov, Johansson, and Lindahl (2016) and Kuziemko et al. (2018).”
Gender gaps in labor informality: The motherhood effect (2019, background): “Our results indicate that the motherhood effect in Chile is smaller than in countries like the US and the UK (Kuziemko et al., 2018; Kleven et al., 2019), but it is larger than in Northern European countries like Denmark or Sweden (Kleven et al., 2018, 2019).”
Children and the Remaining Gender Gaps in the Labor Market (2020, unknown): “Such unexpected increases in parental time demands may explain why recent cohorts of women appear to systematically underestimate the employment consequences of motherhood and are “surprised” by how difficult it is to combine work and family (Kuziemko et al., 2018).”
The Effects of Social Movements: Evidence from #MeToo (2020, unknown): “Several studies have shown that popular culture, motherhood, education, and programs empowering women can affect gender norms and behavior (e.g., Jensen and Oster, 2009; La Ferrara et al., 2012; Banerjee et al., 2019; Dhar et al., 2020; Green et al., 2020; Kuziemko et al., 2020; Field et al., 2021).”