Israeli Ethno-Religious Differences in Motherhood Penalties on Employment and Earnings

Abstract

Israeli society presents a unique context for studying motherhood’s impacts on employment and earnings: High fertility and marriage rates coincide with high rates of women’s education and employment. While past research finds low motherhood penalties in Israel, ethno-religious group differences in these penalties are unexplored. Ours is the first longitudinal study to examine simultaneously motherhood’s employment and wage penalties among Israeli ethno-religious groups. Using newly available panel data, we find that motherhood deters employment among Israeli-Palestinians more strongly than among Jews, and particularly among less-educated Israeli-Palestinians. Similarly, motherhood wage penalties and ethno-religious disparities are greatest among the least-educated women. For all groups, highly educated women incur smaller motherhood penalties in employment and earnings, and in some cases receive motherhood wage premiums. Public-sector employment, particularly for Muslims, is associated with higher postnatal employment, lower motherhood penalties, and motherhood premiums among the highly educated. The stronger enforcement of anti-discrimination and work–family policies in the public sector, along with its schoolteachers’ collective bargaining agreement that raises maternal earnings, may contribute to its more positive outcomes for Israeli-Palestinian mothers. Our findings suggest that increasing educational attainment and public-sector employment among Israeli-Palestinians may reduce ethno-religious inequality in motherhood’s impact on employment and earnings.

The impact of legal representation in Israeli traffic courts: Addressing selection bias and generalizability problems

“…In any case, since the data are presumably representative of the population's SES distribution, using the municipal index is not expected to introduce any additional bias to the statistical inference compared to a more accurate neighborhood index. For additional studies that rely on the SES municipality index in the Israeli context, see Shadmi et al (2011), Levinson et al (2006), and Budig et al (2023).…”