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56 Indus. & Lab. Rel. Rev. 273 (2002-2003)
The Motherhood Wage Penalty Revisited: Experience, Heterogeneity, Work Effort, and Work-Schedule Flexibility

handle is hein.journals/ialrr56 and id is 275 raw text is: THE MOTHERHOOD WAGE PENALTY REVISITED: EXPERIENCE, HETEROGENEITY, WORK EFFORT, AND WORK-SCHEDULE FLEXIBILITY DEBORAH J. ANDERSON, MELISSA BINDER, and KATE KRAUSE* This paper seeks an explanation for the well-documented wage disadvantage of mothers compared to women without children. An analysis of data from the 1968-88 National Longitudinal Survey of Yotng Women shows that human capital inputs and tnobserved heterogeneity explain 55-57% of the gap. Fur- ther analysis suggests that mothers tended to face the highest wage penalty when they first returned to work. A finding that medium-skill mothers (high school graduates) suffered more prolonged and severe wage losses than either low- or high-skill mothers casts doubt on the work-effort explanation for the wage gap, according to which women reduce work effort in response to childcare duties. The authors instead cite variable time constraints: high school graduates are likely to hold jobs requiring their presence during regular office hours, and are unlikely to gain flexibility by finding work at other hours or by taking work home in the evening. t is well documented that mothers earn less than women without children. A variety of factors could explain this wage penalty, including reduced investment in wage-enhancing human capital, unobserved heterogeneity between mothers and non- mothers, and lower work effort by mothers. *Deborah J. Anderson is Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Arizona; Melissa Binder is Assistant Professor of Economics and Kate Krause is Associate Professor of Economics, both at the University of New Mexico. Earlier ver- sions of this paper were presented at Cornell Univer- sity and the Society of Labor Economists 6th Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas. The authors are grateful for the many helpful comments received during those presentations. The authors also thank Francine Blau, John Cheslock, Ronald Ehrenberg, Philip Ganderton, and Dan Hamermesh for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. In this paper, we extend previous studies of the motherhood wage penalty in two ways. First, we consider heterogeneity among mothers in the timing of their return to the labor force. If working mothers of infants and toddlers avoid a wage penalty because they are more career-oriented and more likely to return to the same job than moth- ers who delay their return to the labor force, then wage penalties estimated for a pooled sample of all mothers will mask the true penalty, as well as its source. A data appendix with copies of the computer programs used to generate the results presented in the paper is available from Deborah Anderson at the College of Education, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721. Data extracts were created using SAS; all statistics reported in this study were produced with the software Stata. Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 56, No. 2 (January 2003). © by Cornell University. 0019-7939/00/5602 $01.00

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