The Parity Penalty in Life Course Perspective

Abstract

Research documents a wage penalty for mothers compared to childless women. We demonstrate there is also an occupational status penalty to motherhood. Interrogating supply- and demand-side explanations of the motherhood penalty from the life course perspective, we formulate and test original hypotheses about the short-term and long-run career implications of parity-specific births. We analyze longitudinal data from the European Community and Household Panel for 13 European countries and eight time points between 1994 and 2001. Our fixed-effects models show that status losses for a first birth are not just short-term but accumulate over the career. The timing of a birth in a woman’s life course matters only for older women, who experience a significant penalty to third births. Although the personal strategies that women use to minimize the career costs of motherhood (e.g., having only one child) prove ineffective, our cross-national evidence shows that public policies are linked to the motherhood penalty in occupational status.

The influence of motherhood on income: do partner characteristics and parity matter?

“…In fact, a second child or third child hardly seems to affect women's earnings at all. Adjustments to women's employment therefore indeed seem to be most drastic following the birth of first child (Abendroth et al, 2014). Our findings are also in line with data from Statistics Netherlands (Bierings & Souren, 2011), which showed that working hours are most strongly affected by the birth of a first child.…”

“…We question this assumption, arguing that the reduction in income after a second or third child is less pronounced, as major adjustments to employment mostly take place following the birth of the first child. A recent study on occupational attainment following motherhood is in line with the notion that the transition to motherhood is the crucial factor, not the arrival of subsequent children (Abendroth, Huffman, & Treas, 2014).…”

“…We hypothesized that having a partner who worked fewer hours, who had lower earnings or who had less traditional attitudes, would mitigate the negative effect of motherhood on earnings. Furthermore, building on recent work (Abendroth et al, 2014), we expected to find that the negative effect of motherhood on earnings would decline with parity.…”

“…Mothers may benefit from economies of scale, or they may not be able to afford to cut back their working hours as additional children are born. Abendroth et al (2014) also suggest that employer discrimination may be most pronounced following a first birth. Future research could aim to more fully comprehend why the effect of motherhood on earnings declines with childbirth.…”

“…These considerations suggest that the transition to motherhood is more detrimental to women's earnings than the birth of a second (or third) child. Recent research on the relation between motherhood and occupational status supports this notion of a 'declining penalty with parity' (Abendroth et al, 2014(Abendroth et al, , p. 1003. We expect to find that in the Netherlands, the transition to motherhood is associated with a greater decrease in earnings than a second or higher order birth (H4).…”