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Title: Is the Motherhood Wage Penalty Worse at the Top or Bottom?
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England, Paula A. Bearak, Jonathan M. Budig, Michelle Jean Hodges, Melissa J. |
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Is the Motherhood Wage Penalty Worse at the Top or Bottom? Presented: San Francisco CA, Population Association of America Meetings, May 2012 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: Population Association of America Keyword(s): Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Maternal Employment; Modeling, Fixed Effects; Motherhood; Racial Differences; Wage Differentials; Wage Penalty/Career Penalty; Wages, Women Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. In this paper, we ask whether motherhood wage penalties are higher for women at the top or bottom of skill, wage, and race hierarchies. Two recent papers that address the issue of how the penalties vary by skill and wage present a puzzle. In an unpublished but widely cited NBER paper, Wilde, Batchelder, and Ellwood (2010), using the AFQT cognitive skill test as a measure of skill, find the motherhood penalty to be much higher for higher skilled women before and after controls for experience. This makes sense if we think that the jobs that high-skilled women can get are the hardest to combine with the demands of motherhood without performance being affected. Budig and Hodges (2010), using the same (National Longitudinal Analysis of Youth 1979) dataset, and deploying quantile regression, show that the penalty for motherhood (as a proportion of wage) is much larger for low wage women. Part of this is simply that low wage women drop out the most, and thus, when they re-enter, pay a penalty for their lost experience. But even after adjustments for experience, Budig and Hodges found lower wage women to have them to have higher penalties, possibly reflecting the less family-friendly firms they work for, and/or their low bargaining power on matters of flexibility. Because individuals’ skills and their wages are moderately positively correlated, it is a puzzle that low skill women have lower penalties while low wage women have higher penalties. Research has also examined whether black and white women differ in their motherhood penalties with mixed findings (e.g. Budig and England 2001 find no difference while Waldfogel 1997 finds lower penalties for black women). We examine whether the wage penalty for motherhood is proportionately higher or lower for women at higher points in cognitive skill, wage, and race hierarchies. One animating puzzle is that a paper by Ellwood and colleagues found higher penalties for more cognitively skilled women, while a paper using the same data by Budig and Hodges found higher penalties at lower wage levels; given the correlation between skill and wage, it is surprising if both are true. We use all waves of the NLSY79 with fixed effects models and quantile regression. We assess whether penalties (because of and net of experience) are higher for those scoring higher on the AFQT, for those with lower wages, and for black women. We assess the role of marital status in explaining black/white differences in penalties. We attempt a comprehensive portrait of how motherhood penalties vary by advantage. |
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Bibliography Citation
England, Paula A., Jonathan M. Bearak, Michelle Jean Budig and Melissa J. Hodges. "Is the Motherhood Wage Penalty Worse at the Top or Bottom?" Presented: San Francisco CA, Population Association of America Meetings, May 2012. |