It’s well-known that when a couple has a child, the average woman experiences a “child penalty” in labor market outcomes, while outcomes for the man are largely unchanged. For a discussion of this pattern using US data, here’s an article by Jane Waldfogel from back in 1998 in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. As that paper points out: “As the gender gap in pay between women and men has been narrowing, the ‘family gap’ in pay between mothers and nonmothers has been widening.”
This pattern is widespread around the world. Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, and Gabriel Leite-Mariante consider data for 134 countries in “The Child Penalty Atlas* (published online in The Review of Economic Studies). For those who don’t have enough caffeine in their system at present to tackle the academic paper, the authors have set a “Child Penalty Atlas” website, with a useful overview of method and findings.
Here’s the data problem they face. For a number of countries, there is fairly comprehensive annual data on labor market outcomes and births. Thus, a research can track a basic labor market outcome like whether someone is in the labor force or not, and how the pattern shifts when a couple’s first child is born. Here’s a relatively common pattern using data from Chile. In the years leading up to a first child, both men and women are more likely to be holding jobs (perhaps becasue they are leaving school). But when the first child is born, the employment rate for women drops off, while that for men continues rising a bit, but mainly levels off.
However, many countries do not have annual data. Instead, they have occasional data from a government census or household survey. The researchers then take this approach:
In those cases, we know the age of people’s oldest child, so we know what happens to women and men’s employment after having children. But because we do not observe the same people over time, we do not know what their outcomes were before they had children. How do we address this? In a nutshell, we ‘match’ each observed individual who has just had a first child (i.e., they are at t=0) to a childless person with similar characteristics who is n (n varying from 1 to 5) years younger. We then assume that this childless person will have a child in n years from now. Effectively, we create a population of “future parents” from the population of people who don’t have children and who are very similar to the actual parents we observe.
Is this approach a sensible one? You can check it. Take the countries like Chile that have both kinds of data: annual data and occasional census/survey data. Apply this method of choosing people who are similar in observed characteristics based on the occasional data. Then look at the annual data and check whether this method offers accurate projections. It turns out that the method works pretty well.
The result suggests that child penalties vary a lot across countries. As the map shows, the reduction in women’s labor force participation after a first birth is very low in parts of Africa as well as China and parts of east Asia; intermediate level in the US, Canada, Russia, and parts of Europe like France; and higher in Latin America, parts of the Middle East, and parts of Europe.
in many high-income countries the child penalty explains nearly 100% of the gap of the gap in labor force participation between men and women: for example, it explains 84% of the gap in the United States, 95% in Canada, 97% in Germany, and more than 100% of the gap in Sweden. For many other countries around the world, the child penalty is only part of the labor force participation gap: in some cases, because the child penalty is so small (as in certain countrie in Africa and Asia), and in other cases because the gender gap in labor force participation is so large (as in Latin America and the Middle East).
There is of course an ongoing argument in the United States over the extent to which government programs that support first-time parents, from work leave to child care, might reduce the gender gap in labor force participation. The evidence here doesn’t speak to that point directly. After all, many countries across Europe have considerably more extensive parental leave policies and child care support than the United States, but also a greater child penalty. Policies to support new parents probably have a different effect depending on broader social expectations: if the social expectation is that most mothers will return to the labor force, these policies might help the transition out of the labor force and back in; but if the social expectation is that mothers not return to the labor force soon, or at all, then parental leave and other supports may just smooth the path out of the labor force.
