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As a parent, it is inevitable that you will be hit by unexpected events. How good it feels for a stranger to touch your child. How many families in London own the same brand of off-road vehicles. You get used to how quickly you can wolf down (cold) meals within a minute. How hiccups can calm angry howls. How the hell do single parents get by. How long can a seedling go without a bowel movement. How fast they grow. When it comes to mother economics, the surprises don’t stop there.
The first is how little other people value parental time. No, I cannot attend the nursery activities commemorating International Play-Doh Day at 4.30pm on weekdays. Parenting is more taxing than it used to be because of the increased pressure to optimize your kids by stimulating cultural activities. Between 1965 and 2012, the amount of time mothers spent parenting increased in the US, UK, Germany and Denmark. Only France fell. Alice Evans of the University of Toronto said the French government took on the responsibility of producing perfect citizens so women could get on with their lives.
Call me naive if you want. But I still find it incredible that children contribute so much to the gender pay gap, at least in rich countries. UK Working Age Women 2019 earned 40 Men are one percent less likely to be paid lower hourly wages, work shorter hours, and not work at all. The key is timing—these inequalities explode after having a baby.In Denmark, the abundance of data enabled an appropriate disaggregation, and by 2013 about 80 One percent of income inequality between men and women is caused by the clicking of little feet, not differences in education levels. This proportion has increased dramatically over time.
As it turns out, leaning forward is a lot harder when you have a child strapped to you.recent work documents examines differences in earnings of highly educated men and women in Sweden up to age 45. The women they studied didn’t appear to be choosing cuter university subjects or careers with particularly dim salary prospects. Instead, about 70% of the gap is due to differences in the likelihood of promotions (and consequent increases in salary) within the same company. Two-fifths of lost wage growth due to missed promotions occurred in the year of birth and the year after birth.
The worrying news for young women is that even before having children, they are less likely to advance than similar men. The even better news is that by age 40, the gap closes. (Though they didn’t regain the previously missed wage increases.) Perhaps women choose to shy away from so-called “greedy jobs” because they expect to care for a greedier baby. Discrimination also plays a role, says Mary Ann Bronson of Georgetown University, one of the study’s authors, as employers fear young women will take maternity leave and deny them the opportunity.
You might guess that parents are simply responding to market forces. Maybe the dad earns a little more than their partner, maybe it’s because they’re older and have further careers. With the dizzying cost of diapers and daycare, not to mention finding room for all the extra stuff, sacrificing wages for low-income earners may be the only option possible.but a report A survey by the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that even among heterosexual couples with higher female earnings in the UK, employment fell by 13% after the birth of their first child and continued for a decade. For those who remained employed, the average hours worked fell by more than a quarter. This doesn’t look like financial optimization.
At least there are plenty of unusual ways to manage motherhood. A new database Measuring the impact of children on women’s relative to men’s employment, in Portugal, for example, the impact is 16%, while in neighboring Spain it is a staggering 38%. The optimistic explanation is that we can choose, through norms and institutions, how childcare is allocated. Like a parent perusing a bag of squeezed purees, we have options.
The last surprise is how people think everything is down to preferences or constraints, rather than a vague interplay between the two. Figuring out the effects of peer pressure is tricky – I can’t tell you exactly why I love my stroller so much. Pushing a happy toddler on the swing is certainly more rewarding than dealing with a bad boss. The trade-off might be slightly different, though, if younger women were more likely to be bosses.
soumaya.keynes@ft.com
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