The Motherhood Penalty: What is Going to Shift the Needle?

With evidence that generous family policy does little to dent the gender pay gap is it time to redirect our energies?

As of the beginning of the year, I am no longer my family’s main breadwinner. This is both an abject relief and a more complicated disappointment and definitely something that my relationship is still grappling with. While it’s facile to draw comparisons between an individual family’s experience and larger data sets, I was stopped in my tracks this week by Jessica Grose writing in the NYT simply because her piece so aptly reflected my own experiences in this arena. 

Citing a 2023 paper which looked at 22 years of US administrative data, Grose reports that the motherhood penalty (the financial hit incurred by women by giving birth; men conversely on average increase their salaries by becoming fathers, furthermore, a woman’s wage never recovers comparatively) was ‘surprisingly robust’ even in female-breadwinner heterosexual families. In fact, the higher a woman’s earning in comparison to her male partner before birth, the more she will be penalised financially within her relationship by becoming a parent (‘higher-earning women experience a 60 percent drop from pre-childbirth earnings relative to their lower-earning male partner and the highest of our various sample stratifications.’) Depressingly the paper also shows that the motherhood penalty grows faster over time at firms headed by other women. 

These brushstrokes obviously don’t encapsulate every part of the story. My family’s finances fit exactly with the pattern observed, but there are other reasons behind the economic swapsies in my household. Firstly, my husband-to-be is younger than me and started his career on the back foot with no qualifications. At 30 he was still earning significantly under the average wage (just as I was), the only difference was that he was already a parent. Neither of our careers took off financially until our mid-thirties, and our salaries at 34, which is the age I was when I had my first baby, were roughly the same.