Birth Timing and Wage Growth of Women Lawyers

• In Event: 220 - Section on the Sociology of the Family Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 20. Motherhood Penalties

Abstract

Although researchers consistently report that postponing childbearing is associated with higher wage growth for college educated women, we know of no analyses of associations between birth timing and wage growth for women in “greedy” professions such as law. In this paper, we fill this gap by examining the relationships between timing of first birth and wage growth over a fourteen year career span for women who graduated from the University of Michigan Law School (UMLS) between 1976 and 1991. We compare wage trajectories of mothers who had their first child during the launch years (early career mothers) to those of mothers who had their first child during the growth years (late career mothers). We examine three potential pathways by which early childbearing has been hypothesized to lower wage growth: via labor supply reductions, via job choices, and via family size; and we investigate whether the negative effects of labor supply reductions on wage growth are larger for early career mothers than for late career mothers.

Authors

• Mary C. Noonan, University of Iowa

• Mary Corcoran, University of Michigan