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Child penalties
Child penalties (also known as motherhood penalty) refer to the negative impact of parenthood on women’s labor market outcomes relative to men’s. After childbirth, women’s employment rates, working hours, career progression, and earnings tend to decline sharply relative to men’s outcomes. These penalties are central to understanding gender inequality in the labor market, explaining most of the earnings gap in many high-income countries.
Research shows that long-run earnings penalties are around 20% in Nordic countries, 30–40% in the United States and United Kingdom, and over 50% in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. While policies like job-protected parental leave and childcare may help, child penalties are primarily shaped by labor market structure and gender norms.
The magnitude and persistence of child penalties have made them central to the debate about the gender pay gap. In Denmark, for example, the fraction of the gender pay gap explained by parenthood increased from about 40% in 1980 to over 80% by 2013. To address this issue, policymakers have proposed solutions such as shared parental leave, affordable childcare, flexible work arrangements, and shifts in societal norms.
Early origins of the debate can be traced back to Gary Becker’s A Treatise on the Family (1981). Becker argued that women earn less than men because childbearing interrupts their careers and reduces human capital accumulation. In the 1990s, empirical studies provided early support: Waldfogel (1998) and Lundberg and Rose (2000) documented a family gap in the U.S. and U.K.: mothers earned 10‑15 % less than comparable women without children. Sociological work emphasized discrimination; Correll, Benard & Paik (2007) found hiring bias against mothers.
In the late 20th century, women delayed childbirth, surpassed men in college enrollment, and dual-earner household became the norm. Yet the gender pay gap persisted. This opened the question of how much of the gender gap is caused by parenthood, and what explains the gendered effects of parenthood?
Answering this required tracking both partners before and after childbirth. A methodological breakthrough came when Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, and collaborators developed an event-study approach using administrative registers that follow workers over time. In their landmark study, Kleven, Landais & Søgaard (2019) show that, in Denmark, men and women have similar earnings trajectories until the birth of their first child, but diverge sharply after childbirth. Women’s earnings fall by about 20% relative to men’s and never catch back up. This “child penalty” captured the causal effect of parenthood on gender inequality. Subsequent work has replicated this pattern in many countries. Where panel data are unavailable, Kleven (2025) developed a pseudo-event study method using only cross-sectional data. By 2024, child‑penalty estimates existed for over 130 countries, revealing large cross-country variation but a consistently unequal impact of children on women’s earnings.
Child penalties are measured by comparing women’s and men’s labor-market outcomes before and after the birth of a first child. The standard empirical framework is an event-study, which compares labor market outcomes—such as earnings or employment—over time, relative to the moment of childbirth. In this setting, the “event” is the birth of a first child.
The event-study framework builds a timeline around childbirth, labeling each year before and after the event. The year of birth of the first child is denoted as event time . Years before childbirth are indicated by negative numbers (e.g., is one year before birth), and years after childbirth are indicated by positive numbers ( one year after birth, two years after, and so forth). The method tracks how outcomes evolve over time for mothers and fathers, estimating average changes at each point relative to the year before birth. Results are computed separately by gender, allowing researchers to compare how childbirth affects women and men differently.
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Child penalties
Child penalties (also known as motherhood penalty) refer to the negative impact of parenthood on women’s labor market outcomes relative to men’s. After childbirth, women’s employment rates, working hours, career progression, and earnings tend to decline sharply relative to men’s outcomes. These penalties are central to understanding gender inequality in the labor market, explaining most of the earnings gap in many high-income countries.
Research shows that long-run earnings penalties are around 20% in Nordic countries, 30–40% in the United States and United Kingdom, and over 50% in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. While policies like job-protected parental leave and childcare may help, child penalties are primarily shaped by labor market structure and gender norms.
The magnitude and persistence of child penalties have made them central to the debate about the gender pay gap. In Denmark, for example, the fraction of the gender pay gap explained by parenthood increased from about 40% in 1980 to over 80% by 2013. To address this issue, policymakers have proposed solutions such as shared parental leave, affordable childcare, flexible work arrangements, and shifts in societal norms.
Early origins of the debate can be traced back to Gary Becker’s A Treatise on the Family (1981). Becker argued that women earn less than men because childbearing interrupts their careers and reduces human capital accumulation. In the 1990s, empirical studies provided early support: Waldfogel (1998) and Lundberg and Rose (2000) documented a family gap in the U.S. and U.K.: mothers earned 10‑15 % less than comparable women without children. Sociological work emphasized discrimination; Correll, Benard & Paik (2007) found hiring bias against mothers.
In the late 20th century, women delayed childbirth, surpassed men in college enrollment, and dual-earner household became the norm. Yet the gender pay gap persisted. This opened the question of how much of the gender gap is caused by parenthood, and what explains the gendered effects of parenthood?
Answering this required tracking both partners before and after childbirth. A methodological breakthrough came when Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, and collaborators developed an event-study approach using administrative registers that follow workers over time. In their landmark study, Kleven, Landais & Søgaard (2019) show that, in Denmark, men and women have similar earnings trajectories until the birth of their first child, but diverge sharply after childbirth. Women’s earnings fall by about 20% relative to men’s and never catch back up. This “child penalty” captured the causal effect of parenthood on gender inequality. Subsequent work has replicated this pattern in many countries. Where panel data are unavailable, Kleven (2025) developed a pseudo-event study method using only cross-sectional data. By 2024, child‑penalty estimates existed for over 130 countries, revealing large cross-country variation but a consistently unequal impact of children on women’s earnings.
Child penalties are measured by comparing women’s and men’s labor-market outcomes before and after the birth of a first child. The standard empirical framework is an event-study, which compares labor market outcomes—such as earnings or employment—over time, relative to the moment of childbirth. In this setting, the “event” is the birth of a first child.
The event-study framework builds a timeline around childbirth, labeling each year before and after the event. The year of birth of the first child is denoted as event time . Years before childbirth are indicated by negative numbers (e.g., is one year before birth), and years after childbirth are indicated by positive numbers ( one year after birth, two years after, and so forth). The method tracks how outcomes evolve over time for mothers and fathers, estimating average changes at each point relative to the year before birth. Results are computed separately by gender, allowing researchers to compare how childbirth affects women and men differently.