The impact of becoming a parent on people’s work tends to be greater for women. Although this “child penalty” crosses borders, the magnitude of the penalty varies around the world. In the UK: The employment impact of the first child is 33% greater for women. Gabriel Leite Mariante We present the results of the Child Penalty Atlas survey.
LSE Festival 2024 will feature the Child Penalty Atlas exhibition.
Despite significant convergence over the past century, gaps between men and women in the labour market still exist in almost all countries, across almost all dimensions: employment, wages, promotion, income, etc. The chart below shows the size of the gender gap in employment across the world.
Figure 1. Map of gender employment gaps around the world
Note: The gender gap reflects the difference in employment rates relative to men’s employment rates.
Recent studies have shown that an increasingly large part of this gap stems from the differential impact of parenthood on men and women – the so-called “child penalty” that falls disproportionately on mothers. In Denmark, for example, the share of the gender gap in earnings attributable to parenthood rose from about 40% in 1980 to more than 80% in 2013. The birth of a child reduces mothers’ earnings by 20% in the long term and their labor market participation by 13% compared to fathers.
Until now, evidence quantifying the child penalty has been limited to a few wealthy countries because studying the phenomenon requires large amounts of longitudinal labour market data – a major demand for most low- and middle-income countries.
Our recent project, the Child Penalty Atlas, fills this gap by employing a new methodology that mitigates the extensive data requirements, allowing us to quantify the child penalty using only household survey and census samples, which are much more readily available around the world.
In the Atlas, we collect nationally representative data for 134 countries (representing over 95% of the world’s population) and calculate the child penalty for employment. Our goal is to answer the question: “To what extent does the birth of a first child affect the employment probability of mothers more than that of fathers?”
Our findings are crystal clear: the child penalty is a universal phenomenon. In almost every country on the planet, the birth of a first child has a large and persistent effect, reducing women’s employment but leaving men’s employment unaffected. Nowhere around the world has that effect been reversed or seen to change men’s employment trajectories after fatherhood.
Despite being universal, the magnitude of the penalty varies widely around the world. In the UK, the child penalty is 33 percent. This means that women are affected, on average, 33 percent more than men. In the 10 years after the birth of their first child, women’s employment falls 33 percent more than men. In the US, the figure is 25 percent. In India it is also 25 percent, but in China it is 4 percent. On average, the child penalty is largest in Western Europe and Latin America, and smallest in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.
Figure 2. Child penalty in selected countries
Figure 3. Map of child penalties around the world
Note: The child penalty is calculated as the difference between the percentage decline in employment rates for men and women.
Why does the child penalty vary so much across countries? We can’t give you a definitive answer, but some interesting patterns emerge when we compare the results. The child penalty is higher in more urbanized societies, which rely less on agriculture and more on salaried work in industry and services. This is consistent with the idea that urbanization and the transition away from agriculture separates home and work, making child care a barrier to work. Our research finds that this barrier is significantly gendered: men are unaffected, but women bear the entire burden.
While parenthood is a large determinant of gender inequality, it is only part of the picture. In a hypothetical scenario where women do not work before or after childbirth, the child penalty would be zero, but the gender gap would be very large. This means that for any country, we can quantify how much of the gap it explains by dividing the child penalty by the total gender gap.
When we compare these rates across countries with different income levels, a surprising pattern emerges: in very low-income countries, the gender gap is large but children are hardly disadvantaged, suggesting that gender inequality is driven by other factors before children are born, perhaps education or cultural norms.
In middle-income countries, the child penalty starts to appear and the “unexplained” gap persists. As a result, the gender gap reaches its highest point. In high-income countries, women close other gaps and the “unexplained” part disappears, but the child penalty persists. As a result, in most wealthy countries, the child penalty explains virtually the entire gender gap. Beyond the general inequality between men and women, there is also inequality between mothers and everyone else (including women who do not have children).
As a next step in our research plan, we aim to investigate how policymakers can tackle this problem with the tools available to them. Around the world, childcare is becoming increasingly expensive, and parental leave policies are almost always unequal for mothers and fathers. We want to quantify the extent to which these factors contribute to the child penalty and identify how governments can act to eliminate this unequal burden. The fact that parenthood is a major driver of gender inequality is not only unfair, but also inefficient. Half of the population faces stiffer barriers in their careers because of their gender.
- Author’s note: All findings from the Child Penalty Atlas are publicly available and available to download. The Child Penalty Atlas is a collaboration between Professor Camille Landais (LSE) and Professor Henrik Kleven (Princeton).
- This blog post It expresses the views of the author, and not the position of LSE Business Review or the London School of Economics and Political Science.
- Featured image courtesy of Shutterstock
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