Highly-skilled women working in well-paid jobs suffer the greatest “motherhood penalty” when taking time off to raise children, according to a recent analysis.
All women take a career hit to have kids, reports a team led by Paula England of New York University in the journal American Sociological Review. For each child she has, the average woman suffers a “motherhood penalty” of 4 to 7 percent of income.
But the greatest disproportionate loss to future wages is felt by those at the top. For these women, the penalty climbs to 10 percent per child.
That’s because women with high skills in highly paid jobs regularly get raises and promotions as they gain experience and tenure — which contribute, over time, to a significant increase in income, said England. Any time off lowers that sharp trajectory, so is much more costly for their future earnings.
“Even small amounts of lost experience are very expensive,” they found.
“Every month or year they drop out puts them at risk of missing raises and promotions — which are the steepest in the jobs they are in,” said England, a former affiliate of Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, whose research focuses on gender inequality in labor markets.
In contrast, women with fewer skills in low paying jobs have a flatter trajectory, with a smaller increase in wages per year. So the time they take off has a lower overall impact.
Other surveys have shown that parenting makes it harder for women to advance in their careers. But this is the first to compare women in different professional strata.
It helps explains, in part, the findings from a recent UC Davis study: Overall, women hold just 12.3 percent of board seats and highest-paid executive positions in California’s top 400 companies, including many global brand powerhouses such as Apple, Chevron, Intel, Visa, Google, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle.
“The system, probably unintentionally, is penalizing the highest achieving women the most for childbearing,” said England, director of Graduate Studies at NYU’s Department of Sociology.
She proposed these possible remedies for companies seeking to recruit high-level women: “make jobs more flexible so women would drop out less, make sure that parental leaves that are allowed don’t interrupt raises, or make sure those giving bonuses don’t make assumptions about mothers without looking at performance,” she said.
The researchers examined women’s employment and family data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a nationally representative survey of 4,658 women from 1976, when they were 14- to 21-year-olds, to 2010, when they were largely past their child-rearing years at ages 45 to 52.
“High income, high skilled” women tended to be managers of different types, as well as accountants, nurses, teachers and therapists. Lower skilled and lower income women typically worked in secretarial and administrative positions, food service, home health aides and retail sales.
As a society, it is also important to reduce the motherhood penalty for women at the low end of the pay scale, as well, she added.
“These women are the most likely to be the sole support of children — because it is harder for them to find employed husbands, and many stresses contribute to their higher divorce rate — and when they do have bread winning husbands, they often have low earnings,” she said.
“So in absolute terms, their situation, and that of their families, is less enviable,” and society might want to give priority to policies, such as child care subsidies, to help low-income women. she said. “They are likely to have trouble affording good child care with flexible hours, even while their jobs may be the least flexible.”
The penalties were lower for black women than for white women; however, unlike the white women, the penalties for black women did not differ significantly by skill or wage
“Our analysis shows that privilege — on race, wage or skill — has its price,” the study concludes.
“In an era when there are still few women CEOs and we have yet to elect a woman president,” she said, “it is important to understand how much motherhood affects the careers of women at the top and to consider how this can be changed.”
