Birth spacing, human capital, and the motherhood penalty at midlife in the United States

Gough, Margaret

doi:10.4054/demres.2017.37.13

Cited by 21 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…The longer women experience time constraints to invest in paid labor because of care work for small children, the longer they may need to stall career investments and the lower their opportunities to catch up career-wise later in their lives. By contrast, women who delay motherhood may have not only developed greater personal attachment to the labor market but also accumulated greater human capital prior to parenthood (Gough 2017). This may increase their opportunities to keep attached to the labor market during childrearing years or to reenter the labor market in high-quality and well-paid employment after family-related employment disruption.…”

Section: Deviations From the Traditional Family Trajectorymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Long-Term Costs of Family Trajectories: Women’s Later-Life Employment and Earnings Across Europe

2020

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The "motherhood earnings penalty" is a well-established finding in many Western countries. However, a divide between mothers and nonmothers might oversimplify reality given that the family life course has diversified over the last decades. In addition, whether family choices have consequences for women's employment and earnings in later life is not well known, particularly in a comparative perspective. Using data on 50-to 59-year-old women from the Generations and Gender Programme, the British Household Panel Survey, and SHARELIFE for 22 European countries, we derive a typology of women's family trajectories and estimate its association with women's later-life employment and earnings. Whereas family trajectory-related differences with regard to employment were relatively small, our findings reveal a clear, long-lasting family trajectory gradient in earnings. Childless women (with or without a partner) as well as single mothers had higher personal earnings than women whose family trajectories combined parenthood and partnership. Moreover, in societies in which reconciliation of work and family during midlife is less burdensome, labor market outcomes of women following different family trajectories converge. Our findings show that women's fertility and partnership behavior are inevitably interrelated and jointly influence employment and earning patterns until later in life. The results imply that promoting equal employment opportunities could have long-lasting effects on women's economic independence.

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Section: Deviations From the Traditional Family Trajectorymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Long-Term Costs of Family Trajectories: Women’s Later-Life Employment and Earnings Across Europe

2020

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“…For example, Jocelyn Finlay (2019) uses a large crosscountry dataset to demonstrate that a longer interval between births increases the risk that a woman will not work, while a shorter birth interval increases the likelihood of a woman having a meaningful job. Similarly, Margaret Gough (2017) finds that in the US, childbearing strategies such as delaying the first birth that allow women to accumulate human capital yield the largest benefits in terms of labor market outcomes. Moreover, impact evaluation studies suggest that programs and policies to provide reproductive health and childcare services have facilitated increased educational attainment and better labor market outcomes for women, especially tenure, promotion, and retention in formal-sector jobs (Thévenon 2016;Strupat 2017;Connelly et al 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Intersections of Women’s Economic and Reproductive Empowerment

Gammage¹,

Joshi

Rodgers

2019

Feminist Economics

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This article examines the connections between women's reproductive health, care responsibilities, and the quality of work. The research suggests that the economic empowerment of women, manifest in their choice of where and when to work, and of the terms and conditions of that work, is intimately linked to reproductive empowerment and reproductive outcomes. Simplistic discourse in development policy about educating girls and getting women into the labor force will not translate into goals being met unless attention is paid to women's reproductive health and rights. This analysis highlights the data limitations inherent in existing surveys that frustrate a more-nuanced inquiry into employment and fertility outcomes. Analysts and statistical agencies responsible for household and labor force survey design could certainly apply some of the information they gain from questions that elicit retrospective histories of contraception and fertility to inform their interpretations of women's employment history, job quality, and labor market intermittency.

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“…A related point is that having multiple children under the age of six may have stronger effects on women's labor market outcomes than having just one. Thus, one hypothesis is that wider birth spacing may be beneficial to women's labor market outcomes if it minimizes the time that women have multiple young children in the household or if wider birth spacing allows women to return to work between births (Gough 2017;Troske and Voicu 2013). Consistent with this is the finding that women with short birth intervals (less than two years) tend to have lower cumulative work hours and earnings later in life than those with longer birth intervals (Gough 2017).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, one hypothesis is that wider birth spacing may be beneficial to women's labor market outcomes if it minimizes the time that women have multiple young children in the household or if wider birth spacing allows women to return to work between births (Gough 2017;Troske and Voicu 2013). Consistent with this is the finding that women with short birth intervals (less than two years) tend to have lower cumulative work hours and earnings later in life than those with longer birth intervals (Gough 2017). But the association is non-linear-women with longer birth intervals (7-8 years apart) also tend to have lower cumulative work hours and earnings than those with birth intervals in the 2 to 6 year range.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trends in Years Spent as Mothers of Young Children: The Role of Completed Fertility, Birth Spacing, and Multiple Partner Fertility

Schwartz

Doren

2020

Analyzing Contemporary Fertility

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The number of years women spend as mothers of young children likely has implications for women's lifetime wages, earnings, and time use. Much prior research has pointed to widening education differences in a wide array of family patterns, but none has examined trends in the number of years women spend as mothers of young children. We use retrospective fertility data from the 2014 Survey of Income and Program Participation to show how changes in women's completed fertility and birth spacing produce trends in years women spend as mothers of children under age six from 1967 to 2017. Despite remarkably parallel declines in completed fertility, growing educational differences in birth spacing produced educational divergence in years spent as mothers of young children. Particularly striking is the finding that increases in birth spacing reversed declines in years spent as mothers for women with less than a high school degree such that they spent more years with young children in the 2010s than in the late 1960s. The increasing prevalence of multiple partner fertility explains some but not all of these trends.

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Birth spacing, human capital, and the motherhood penalty at midlife in the United States

Cited by 21 publications

References 53 publications

The Long-Term Costs of Family Trajectories: Women’s Later-Life Employment and Earnings Across Europe

The Long-Term Costs of Family Trajectories: Women’s Later-Life Employment and Earnings Across Europe

The Intersections of Women’s Economic and Reproductive Empowerment

Trends in Years Spent as Mothers of Young Children: The Role of Completed Fertility, Birth Spacing, and Multiple Partner Fertility

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