Content uploaded by Michelle Budig
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Michelle Budig on Jan 15, 2014
Content may be subject to copyright.
A preview of the PDF is not available
Testimony: Michelle J. Budig, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Figures
Figures - uploaded by Michelle Budig
Author content
All figure content in this area was uploaded by Michelle Budig
Content may be subject to copyright.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Motherhood is associated with lower hourly pay, but the causes of this are not well understood. Mothers may earn less than other women because having children causes them to (1) lose job experience, (2) be less productive at work, (3) trade off higher wages for motherfriendly jobs, or (4) be discriminated against by employers. Or the relationship may be spurious rather than causal; women with lower earning potential may have children at higher rates. Using 1982-1993 NLSY data, we examine the motherhood penalty with fixed-effects models chosen to avoid spuriousness. We find penalties of 7 percent per child. Penalties are larger for married women. We show that women with (more) children have less job experience; after controlling for this, a penalty of 5 percent per child remains. We examine whether potentially "mother-friendly" characteristics of the jobs held by mothers explain any of the penalty, but find little evidence of this beyond the tendency of more mothers to work part-time. The portion of the motherhood penalty we cannot explain probably results from effects of motherhood on productivity and/or from employers' discrimination against mothers. While the benefits of mothering diffuse widely, to the employers, neighbors, friends, spouses, and children of the adult who previously received the mothering, the costs are borne disproportionately by mothers.
Using the 1979-2006 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we investigate how the earnings bonus for fatherhood varies by characteristics associated with hegemonic masculinity in the American workplace: heterosexual marital status, professional/managerial status, educational attainment, skill demands of jobs, and race/ethnicity. We find the earnings bonus for fatherhood persists after controlling for an array of differences, including human capital, labor supply, family structure, and wives’ employment status. Moreover, consistent with predictions from the theory of hegemonic masculinity within bureaucratic organizations, the fatherhood bonus is significantly larger for men with other markers of workplace hegemonic masculinity. Men who are white, married, in households with a traditional gender division of labor, college graduates, professional/managerial workers and whose jobs emphasize cognitive skills and deemphasize physical strength receive the largest fatherhood earnings bonuses.
Early child bearers are more vulnerable to the adverse impact of children on wages than are those who delay childbearing. Early child bearers are likely to experience a higher wage penalty because their career interruptions occur during the critical period of career building. Education reduces the magnitude of the penalty. With the use of data from the young women cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey, I investigated the wage losses associated with the presence of children, net of work experience, while addressing unobserved heterogeneity. Consistent with life course theory, the timing of childbearing significantly influences the extent to which this event shapes women's life chances.
Little empirical study has been devoted to the impact of employer-sponsored work-family policies on women’s wages. These policies include flexible scheduling, telecommuting, reduced hours of work, and child care assistance. Although these work innovations may make family caregiving easier, many women fear that lower wage growth and blocked mobility will result from the use of these policies. This project followed a midwestern cohort of employed women for 7 years after childbirth, using detailed information about coverage and use of family responsive policies across all jobs held during that period. Results show consistent negative effects of policy use on wage growth after controlling for many productivity-related characteristics, though the effects vary in size depending on the specific policy used, workers’ job mobility, and the respondent’s managerial or professional status.