By: Gerelyn Terzo

Motherhood is still the toughest (and most rewarding) job on the planet. But you wouldn’t know it by the way many women are treated in corporate America. While both moms and dads share in the joy that children bring, parenthood carries a heftier price tag for women in the workplace.  

A recent study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) reveals that gender inequality is prevalent in the labor market, especially for mothers. Research shows women are likely to experience “motherhood penalties,” aka the gender pay gap, after bearing children. On the flip side, men are often entitled to a wage bonus for becoming dads.  

While this reality might be disturbing, what’s shocking is it’s happening in the most surprising of places. For example, researchers considered households where before kids came along, the women were the main breadwinners working at female-dominated firms. Not only does the motherhood penalty tend to exist here, but it gets worse as time goes on.

In the most egregious of situations, high-earning women suffer a 60% decline in earnings compared with pre-childbirth levels and relative to fathers. But women are also less likely to leave their jobs in search of higher pay after having kids versus men. Instead, most mothers simply choose the lesser of two evils: accept lower pay or leave the workforce altogether. The PNAS study authors stated:  

“For mothers, employment and earnings conditional on being employed fall sharply around the time of birth for women, and, more ominously, may remain permanently lower well after childbirth.” 

Education Push 

Women represent more than three-quarters of the U.S. workforce, 60% of whom hold advanced degrees, per a Harvard study. The number of women with at least a Bachelor’s degree in the labor market is on the rise, reaching 31.3 million as of Q2 2022 compared with 29.1 million before the pandemic.  

Nevertheless, after becoming mothers, women are opting for the most flexible work schedules over higher pay. This could translate to working fewer hours to prioritize childcare. Women are willing to choose lower-pay professions in exchange for a nimbler schedule that’s more supportive of motherhood challenges. 

For example, if a child becomes sick, mothers want to know that they can leave their work duties to focus on caring for their families. The National Women’s Law Center’s Jasmine Tucker explains it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, as it makes more economic sense for the parent making less money to take time off from work to care for sick kids.  

In those cases where the salaries between mom and dad are similar, women are more likely to dedicate more time to childcare and the household while men opt for the office or leisure activities, per Pew Research.  

Double Standard 

While women are penalized in the workplace for becoming parents, men tend to be rewarded by their employers. British organization Touch Stone Extra analyzed wage inequality between moms and dads. After becoming dads, men with full-time jobs were likely to experience a wage bonus, giving them the upper hand over men without kids, earning as much as 22% more at the age of 42, the study revealed. 

Even though society has come a long way in the past 50 years, there’s still more work to be done.  

Feature Image by Pixabay