Is motherhood penalty real? I'm gonna collect some first hand data on this topic next week
When Claudia Goldin won the Nobel Prize for uncovering drivers of gender differences in the labour market last October, I was just about to start my second trimester.
Seeing the trajectory of women’s career since 1790 makes me feel lucky as I was born in the era where women not only can work, but can get high-quality jobs. Yet I gave very little thought about the potential impact of becoming a parent, or more precisely, a mother. Because I had an uneventful first trimester — no morning sickness, little fatigue, the bump wasn’t obvious — life felt normal to me.
(forgive me but I’m gonna omit the birth story and the first few months postpartum, that’s too long a story for today’s snapshot!)
Now as I’m approaching the end of maternity leave and starting a new job next week, I remembered about the nice graph that showed where the gender pay gap came from. I found myself downgraded to the ground floor exactly as depicted in the cartoon (thanks to the maternity pay discount), and I need to build stairs to get out of the pit.
The prospect doesn’t seem promising. I was warned about the motherhood penalty by a recent research by the King’s Fund. I was also reminded by the Economist How motherhood hurts career. And my observations of the peers have largely confirmed the findings.
I’m not sure what awaits me. I don’t know to which extent the average statistics will apply to me. But it won’t be long before I find out the answer, and this time, I will be the partipant for my own case study.
I look forward to sharing with you preliminary findings after 90 days. Stay tuned!