The Effects of Motherhood on Highly Skilled, Highly Paid Women

"Mothers contribute so much to the public good by rearing children because, when they do this, then all of us have better coworkers, better friends, better partners," England says, explaining the unpaid labor of mothers and the way that labor benefits society. "We don't have very many collective ways to keep [mothering]—which is benefiting all of us—from penalizing women so much." Other societies, England adds, do more for women than our own. For instance, some countries share child care expenses, and the United States is shamefully the only developed country that does not provide paid maternity leave.

England's study, "Do Highly Paid, Highly Skilled Women Experience the Largest Motherhood Penalty?", analyzed data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79). The subjects were first surveyed in 1979 and have been regularly surveyed in the years since, creating a database of information that spreads across decades and provides a useful tool for research of long-term social phenomenons. England used this database to follow women throughout their professional careers and motherhood.

In order to measure the financial impact of motherhood upon women of differing socioeconomic status, England measured the income penalty proportionally. "Of course we would expect, in absolute dollars, that any penalty is going to be greater—if we're talking about somebody who's at a 100,000 a year versus somebody who's at 25 [thousand]," England says. She found that women who earn more suffer more of a penalty, proportionately, for having children. "The penalty for high wage, high skilled women is about ten percent per child. For other groups that are either lower wage or less skilled, it's more in the three or four percent range," England says.

Statistically speaking, those numbers are striking. "That's a very big difference," England says. The loss that England calculated is considered the "total penalty," which refers to the overall financial impact of motherhood, including wages lost from maternity leave, to the negative effects of job discrimination, and lowered productivity after birth. "Some other studies have shown that part of the effect is employers discriminate against women when they're mothers and treat them differently and treat them as if there's an effect of motherhood on their productivity even when there isn't," England explains. But she was not able to parse out the effects of discrimination and productivity loss in the data, so her study focuses mainly on the way that wages drop after maternity leave.

According to England, there is a "myth" that high-earning women tend to become mothers and then abandon their high-powered careers to raise children. While this does happen, England says, it's not the norm. In fact, because the cost of abandoning their careers is so high, mothers who earn more are less likely to leave the workforce. Instead, these women may take time off during and after pregnancy—but they also suffer the subsequent financial loss for a long time afterward. "Even though these women at the top drop out the least, whatever little bit of time that some of them take out is very very expensive in percentage terms to them, because they are on these higher, steeper escalators of wage increases," England explains.

She believes that there is evidence of a causal relationship between motherhood and wage penalties. But the different effects of motherhood upon women of differing skill and income levels does not apply to all women. "We end up focusing on white women," England says, explaining that there was too little data of Asian, Hispanic, or Native American women to include them in this study. There was some, but not a lot, of data that included black women, but the trends identified among white mothers were not replicated among black mothers. "Within black women this different penalty by wage and skill doesn't seem to hold," England says. It is not clear why, which is why the study focuses exclusively on white women, but England says that "part of why we can't see these differences by skill and wage," might be, "because these smaller numbers make it harder to see."

While there have been many studies looking at the impact of motherhood on income, England says that more research is needed into employer policies, and how they can "help to ease work family conflict for women and men and help to lessen these [wage] penalties." While it's clear that there is a problem, it's likely that supportive policies around maternity leave and child care could help to curb it. "I'd love to see some new research on that," England says. "I think we could really use that."