Search Results

Author: Kim, Ji Yeon
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Kim, Ji Yeon
Rebound of Never? A Life Course Approach to the Motherhood Wage Penalty
Master's Thesis, Department of Sociology, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2020
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (PQDT)
Keyword(s): Age at First Birth; Life Course; Maternal Employment; Modeling, Fixed Effects; Mothers, Income; Wage Penalty/Career Penalty; Wages, Women

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

This paper documents the long-term consequences of motherhood on women's wages over the course of their postpartum lives. I argue that using a single number to report the average effect of childbirth on wages over the entire span of women's postpartum life masks the variation of the motherhood wage penalty over smaller increments of time. In this paper, I ask whether the wage penalty experienced by mothers increases, decreases or remains constant over time and test if and to what extent some of the commonly cited mechanisms of the motherhood wage penalty explain the shape of the penalty over the life course. To answer these questions, this research draws from the 1979-2016 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and traces the motherhood wage penalty for over 20 years into women's postpartum lives. Using fixed-effects modeling and allowing for a flexible specification of time since first childbirth, I find a curvilinear relationship between first childbirth and wages over time. The motherhood wage penalty accumulates for the first 10 to 15 years following the birth but tapers off in the later years.
Bibliography Citation
Kim, Ji Yeon. Rebound of Never? A Life Course Approach to the Motherhood Wage Penalty. Master's Thesis, Department of Sociology, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2020.