Rolling the Dice;
Breaking down the motherhood penalty
Is anything more iconic than Whitney Wolfe Herd’s recent IPO, holding her baby on her hip, the youngest female CEO to ever take a company public?
A woman who founded a company to empower women, after facing sexual harassment in a previous role, beaming with possibility.
Whitney is representative of the millennial generation of women, those of us who have grown up with the narrative that “women can have it all.” The generation of women who take up 56% of seats at colleges and universities. The generation who are freezing our eggs and delaying families to focus on our careers, to be able to afford a fulfilling family life. The generation of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of Brittany Packnett Cunningham. The generation who has now seen a Madam Vice President and who won’t stop until we get a woman in the highest office, because we know women leaders push through policies that work for all women. We are a generation focused on dismantling systemic racism, child poverty, housing inequity, and yes, the wage gap.
We are also the generation of women faced with the statistic that we won’t achieve gender equality for another 108 years. The generation of working mothers struggling through a pandemic that has eradicated the scarce support that existed before. The generation that has lived through two massive economic crises, the longest war in US history, skyrocketing costs of living, of university, and healthcare. We are a generation faced with the stark reality that home ownership is one of the only ways to accrue wealth in the United States, but very few of us can get approved for a mortgage because we’re riddled with student loans and medical debt.
It is this context that continues to shape the way that we must view the road to gender equity.
Often, when we look at the gender pay gap, it’s in a year-long increment, and in the most recent snapshots, we see that women make approximately $0.81 for every $1 that men make.
A 2018 study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, accurately titled Still a Man’s Labor Market, investigated the gender pay gap over the span of 15 years for the same men and women. By using a multi-year analysis, we have a clearer picture of the impact of taking time out of the workforce for women.
The study found that women actually earn $0.49 for every $1 that men make. For women who took JUST ONE YEAR out of the workforce over the 15 year span, their earnings were 39% lower than women who worked straight through - a penalty that has GROWN rather than shortened over time.
Why is this happening?
The deeply imbued American ethos, that it is the devotion we put into work that will bring us success and through which we can overcome any obstacle. The American Dream trope that permeates so much of our culture and politics, our reservations around social programming and support, because to help others out would be to cheat this system designed to benefit a select few, white men. The system that wasn’t designed to account for motherhood, that wasn’t built on equity but on access.
So much of the motherhood penalty is a direct result of centuries of this narrative. Women are forced to try and meet the expectations of both caregiver and career woman; women spend more time with their children now than they did in the 1960s, and they’re also working full time jobs. When women do want to grow families, they’re faced with a system that doesn’t provide paid maternity leave, let alone consider paternity leave a true option. Then add in the fact that childcare is more expensive than public college in 33 states, and we see women drop out of the workforce to avoid those costs. And that time out of the workforce, the balancing act of part-time work and childcare, is crushing women’s retirement and financial independence.
In a survey Mirza conducted last month, 73% of women said that they thought having a child would hold them back in their careers. And it’s not hard to see why.
Women are rolling the dice professionally and biologically, trying to find the perfect moment in time to have their first child. We weigh our promotional pathway, the hours we’re expected to be in the office, whether or not we need to switch industries to have a less demanding or more flexible career. Some of us start our own companies to make sure that we’ll have paid maternity leave. According to a recent survey by Modern Fertility, a majority of us are delaying having our first child until we can make just a little bit more money.
The thing is, delaying children is a gamble that only works for some of us. Delaying having children helps only women working in very specific industries and roles - think lawyers, financial advisors, etc. Delaying children in lower wage occupations, service industries, and more actually exacerbates the motherhood penalty; in fact, in those cases it’s better for women to have children earlier.
Liana Christin Landivar, a Ph.D at the US Department of Labor, performed a study last year on first birth timing and the effects on the gender wage gap, by occupation. Using her parameters, we’ve run the numbers for 4 different occupations to see how the timing of birth would affect these different women, and you can see the numbers below.
We’ve highlighted the variance for women working in the same occupation, who either have children on the earlier side of their careers versus those who have children later on in their careers. For some professions, lawyers especially, the penalty for having children early on is up to 10%, whereas delaying children actually can bump a lawyer’s salary by 12%! That swing is massive, but it is not the norm.
As you can see from the teacher example, teachers are actually penalized by delaying childbirth, and that is much more common across professions.
Delaying children isn’t just a gamble with the motherhood penalty; it also comes at a hefty price for many would-be parents.
Female fertility declines steadily after 35, for men it’s after 45, and the average cost of one cycle of IVF is $23,000. And, when you consider that three full cycles increases your chances of getting pregnant to just under 53%, that is an extremely high price tag to pay for people already struggling with student loans, mortgages, and other debt.
So it all comes down to this: does delaying childbirth help women professionally? The answer; it shouldn’t even be a consideration.
Landivar concluded:
This study shows that delaying childbearing may be an effective strategy to mitigate the wage penalty among the minority of women employed in high-wage occupations that require extensive career preparation, but women in low wage occupations experienced little economic benefit from older motherhood. These results challenge the broader narrative that individual women can improve their long-term earnings and partly overcome the structural motherhood wage gap by delaying fertility. Rather, expanding work-family policies, benefits, and flexibilities across occupations may show better promise in reducing the motherhood wage gap than delaying motherhood (Landivar 2020).