Articlegreen2009

Motherhood, labor force behavior, and women’s careers: An empirical assessment of the wage penalty for motherhood in britain, germany, and the united states

587 citations0/0 files storedDemography

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics Labor market dynamics and wage inequality Labour Market and Migration

Abstract

Using harmonized longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), we trace career prospects after motherhood for five cohorts of American, British, and West German women around the 1960s. We establish wage penalties for motherhood between 9% and 18% per child, with wage losses among American and British mothers being lower than those experienced by mothers in Germany. Labor market mechanisms generating the observed wage penalty for motherhood differ markedly across countries, however. For British and American women, work interruptions and subsequent mobility into mother-friendly jobs fully account for mothers' wage losses. In contrast, respective penalties are considerably smaller in Germany, yet we observe a substantial residual wage penalty that is unaccounted for by mothers' observable labor market behavior. We interpret this finding as indicating a comparatively more pronounced role for statistical discrimination against mothers in the German labor market.

Citations in this library

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 587 citations exist upstream.

References

2001Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data 1973Job Market Signaling 1983Human Capital 1993Human Capital 2007Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty?1985Human Capital, Effort, and the Sexual Division of Labor 2001The Wage Penalty for Motherhood 1996Internationally Comparable Measures of Occupational Status for the 1988 International Standard Classification of Occupations

Cited by

2010Work and Family Research in the First Decade of the 21st Century 2012The Motherhood Penalty in Cross-National Perspective: The Importance of Work-Family Policies and Cultural Attitudes 2010Differences in Disadvantage 2016Do Highly Paid, Highly Skilled Women Experience the Largest Motherhood Penalty?2009Is There a Career Penalty for Mothers' Time Out? A Comparison of Germany, Sweden and the United States 2021The unequal impact of parenthood in academia 2017Why Should Women Get Less? Evidence on the Gender Pay Gap from Multifactorial Survey Experiments

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.