The Impact of Fertility on Women’s Work Experience: Evaluating the Motherhood Penalty among Mature Women

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

Abstract

Since the 1970s women’s labor force participation significantly increased driven by the rise in the number of mothers who remained employed. The entrance of mothers to the labor market helped reduced the gender gap in labor force participation and occupational outcomes. However, since the 1990s this progress has stalled. Women still experience a series of obstacles to combine work and family life once they become mothers. In this paper, I evaluate the extent to which fertility reduces women’s work experience using fixed effects models and recent data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, NLSY 1979-2012. The results indicate that, on average, having children decreases women’ work experience by nearly one year per child. However, this effect varies by parity and over the life course, increasing through ages 45-49, then it slightly decreasing but only for parities 2 and lower. The effect of parity continues increasing for higher parity orders. The results suggest that women who have 2 or fewer children are able to make up some of their lost work experience when children grow up. By ages 50-55, having 1 child is associated with 8 fewer months of work experience, and having two children with 1.1 fewer years of work experience. By contrast having 3 or more children is associated with 3.4 fewer years of work experience. Contrary to the specialization theory, being married is instead associated with increased women’s work experience.

Authors

• Sandra M. Florian, University of Southern California

• Lynne M. Casper, University of Southern California