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Title: Do Attitudes Matter? Understanding Regional Variation in the Motherhood Wage Penalty in the United States
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Lundberg, Ian
Do Attitudes Matter? Understanding Regional Variation in the Motherhood Wage Penalty in the United States
Presented: New York NY, American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, August 2013
Cohort(s): NLSY79, NLSY97
Publisher: American Sociological Association
Keyword(s): General Social Survey (GSS); Maternal Employment; Modeling, Fixed Effects; Motherhood; Mothers, Income; Regions; Wage Penalty/Career Penalty

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

Children have a negative effect on women's wages. Could this effect depend on cultural context? This paper investigates whether cultural values affect the size of the motherhood wage penalty in the United States. Analyzing longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) 1979 and 1997 cohorts, I find a wage penalty of 3.6% per child. Mothers are nested in 4 regions and 2 cohorts, yielding 8 region-cohort combinations. Person fixed-effects models show variation between region-cohorts in the size of the motherhood wage penalty. I use a multilevel model to investigate this variation. General Social Survey (GSS) data on attitudes toward working mothers in each region-cohort serves as a group-level predictor for the effect of the number of children on women's wages. Results suggest that the motherhood wage penalty is significantly smaller in region-cohorts with cultural values which support mothers' employment.
Bibliography Citation
Lundberg, Ian. "Do Attitudes Matter? Understanding Regional Variation in the Motherhood Wage Penalty in the United States." Presented: New York NY, American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, August 2013.