The lasting financial penalty of motherhood

[IwantToRetire]

Five years after the birth of a first child, mothers’ monthly earnings are on average 42% lower (£1,051 per month) than in the year before birth.

Across five years, mothers lose:

• £65,618 after their first child
• an additional £26,317 after their second
• an additional £32,456 after their third

The likelihood of paid employment also falls significantly after childbirth, dropping by as much as 15 percentage points after a first child, and 10.5 percentage points after a second or third child.

Even when mothers remain in employment, their earnings stay substantially lower for at least five years.

More details https://www.gingerbread.org.uk/our-work/news-and-views/ons-analysis-financial-penalty-motherhood/

Totally agree with you. The first wave feminists gave us much. The problem is, I think, that neo-liberal capitalism benefts women at the top who assume that what suits them suits all, when that's not the case.

Agree totally everything else you say. About time we recognised reproductive labour.

For anyone interested in the stats as a whole, not through the filter of Gingerbread, they are here https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthandwellbeing/bulletins/theimpactofmotherhoodonmonthlyemployeeearningsandemploymentstatusengland/april2014todecember2022

Possibly, possibly not. Though women reducing hours while they have young children does not have as profound an impact on lifetime earnings, nor the economy as a whole, as women dropping out of skilled work does.

But, as I said, properly subsidized childcare could well be more effective.

Sure, and that might be great for many woman.

But if women keep choosing the more flexible, and somewhat less well paid options, and men are more likely to choose jobs that are less flexible, or even involve things like working away, women will remain less well paid on average.

There are always going to be jobs where people are wanted who will step up to significant demands of time, or inflexible working conditions.

That's a rather dystopian vision.

I think many women would go pretty far to try to bring down that kind of dystopia.

Yes. If men don’t change, women will continue to take up the slack.

However the way the lack of flexibility means a lot of mothers drop out of higher skilled work, which they are then unlikely to be able to return to even after they no longer need flexibility, makes their financial security pretty dodgy. Women who use flexibility and earn less for a while but can then step back up have far more financial resilience. I think that’s a more critical issue than simply having somewhat lower earnings for a while.

Isn’t this just women working fewer hours after having a baby?

If you work fewer hours, in almost all cases your pay goes down.

Very simple explanation!

The women going back to work full time after having a baby, and continuing with their career and seeking promotions etc. aren’t experiencing sharp drops in pay, are they?

I would say I earn significantly less with having had children but then that’s as I prefer to work part time. However I am very fortunate that I’m doing the job I want to be doing, which matches my qualifications, skills and ambitions and earn the same hourly rate as the people doing similar roles full time. When I had my older children that wasn’t the case and it was very difficult to establish and then also maintain my career as I had each child so motherhood did set me back significantly career wise for many years. The things that made the juggle so difficult which have now much improved includes e.g. inflexible working hours, lack of understanding when child sick, lack of available childcare, not having a supportive partner etc

One in three senior management positions is held by a woman, a statistic I find surprising because if they have children, they are either superhuman, exhausted, or have extensive support.

But the point is that the vast majority of people experiencing the pay drop because their hours go down after children are women, which means that their pensions and financial well-being also goes down. The majority of elderly oeople in poverty are women. As others have said on this thread, the choice to reduce hours (and therefore earn less) is not made in a vacuum. That’s the point.

And it is difficult to get back into the workplace after a career break, or to catch up financially if you have dropped your hours, which compounds the issue.

I don’t necessarily think the answer is for parents to both work full-time and make use of childcare full-time, but I do think men need to step up more and society needs to expect men to step up more. Another statistic is that regardless of whether women earn more or not, they still do more childcare and housework. Which means they also have less leisure time. That’s just not fair. There is nothing about being female which says I am better at dusting and hoovering.

Being a single parent means you are at the sharp end of this but it’s a population level issue. Individualising it means that it’s up to every women to fight her own battles, and who wants their home to be a battle ground?

I agree. We also need society, school and employers to step up too. My husband has genuinely been told when he has needed to take a day off/wfh for a sick child, "you've got a wife for that" they questioned his work ethic and made the environment so toxic (he cried at work!) He left the company. All his workplaces have had this similar view. There are not enough men stepping up to force companies to change its just those few men that do loose their jobs. There will always be a Steve or Bob who is willing to work all hours under the sun as if he doesn't have children for the employer to go well Bob does it. He has a family.

This is slightly off topic, but related. Not sure it is worth its own thread.

Parental leave and intimate partner violence
We examine the impact of a 2002 Danish parental leave reform on intimate partner violence (IPV) using administrative data on assault-related hospital contacts. Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that extending fully paid leave increased mothers’ leave-taking and substantially reduced IPV, with effects concentrated among less-educated women. The reform also lengthened birth spacing, while separations remained unchanged and earnings effects were modest. The timing and heterogeneity of impacts point to fertility adjustments—rather than exit options or financial relief—as the key mechanism. Parental leave policy thus emerges as an underexplored lever for reducing IPV.
https://ifs.org.uk/publications/parental-leave-and-intimate-partner-violence

That's interesting. Has anyone gone further with investigation, I wonder?

One possibility might be looking at how partners share their pensions, especially after the death of one. There are good reasons couples used to be treated as a unit, it tends to mean that if the woman takes a pay or benefits hit caring for kids it evens out. The more you separate the two and treat them as individuals the less that is true.

Is it worth contacting the authors?

Have to say I didn't totally understand how or why. I mean just having figures doesn't explain that.

I agree. It's odd. Could well be worth asking. I will back-track and find them.

The study seems to be suggesting that the way to reduce IPV, if I read the results correctly, is for mothers to take extended paid leave after birth and that the reduced violence peaks around years three and four afterwards, at the point when usually a subsequent child would be born. (The study said that fathers’ leave taking did not significantly change after the reform, whereas mothers took on average a month more).
The study acknowledges that women will have lower life-time earnings from longer periods of paid leave. It doesn’t seem to acknowledge that they are focusing on women’s behaviours to address a problem of male violence. I find that problematic.

the ‘why’ was given at the end of the paper, that longer fertility spacing may reduce the stress from rapid successive pregnancies, reducing conflict and IPV risk.

@TalulaHalulah - many thanks for the detail

Where you say It doesn’t seem to acknowledge that they are focusing on women’s behaviours to address a problem of male violence. I find that problematic explains the sort of unease I had, but never went back to read more cosely.

Yes, the way to stop male violence is for men to stop being violent. One may extrapolate that with longer leave and fewer children, women are a) more able to take on more of the care-giving and b) be less stressed and less liable to ask for their partners to weigh in, which may be what they leads to the conflict they mention, so it seems to be saying men’s lives are less pressured, they won’t be provoked by conflict, so they are less likely to hit out (literally). It’s a new version of provocation as a defence.

No idea how it fits with what we know about coercive control and IPV, but it seems to me a population level of ‘if I do x, y or z, the abuse will stop’. Of course anything which can be done to safeguard women should be done, but why is this about women’s behaviour? The study talks about longer leave-taking but it’s fairly well-hidden in the pages that the longer leave-taking is by women and men’s leave-taking does not change. Talking about ‘parental leave policy’ obscures this point.

Now if they were saying that men had taken more shared leave as a result of the reform and there was less IPV as a result, that would be something.

Or to be really cynical, state funding to "help" women live with violent men?