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Childbearing Risk, Job Sectors, and the Motherhood Wage Penalty

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Abstract

Recent studies have advanced our knowledge of the motherhood wage penalty by expanding its temporal scope and adding a contextualized perspective. Unaddressed questions related to this advancement are whether the risk of childbearing causes a wage loss for mothers-to-be and whether the influence of childbearing risk varies across different job sectors. China’s “dandu policy,” whereby mothers are divided by their eligibility for a second child, creates a natural experiment to answer these questions. Using data from the China Family Penal Studies and employing the difference-in-difference approach, this study finds that, under a national-level pro-natalist policy, mothers who are at risk of a second child suffer a wage loss in the private sector, whereas this motherhood wage penalty does not appear in the public sector. The findings reveal that potential fertility, in addition to realized fertility, can lead to the motherhood wage penalty. This “potential fertility”—based motherhood wage penalty is highly dependent on job sectors.

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Data used in this study is for public use after applying for access to it.

Notes

  1. Some studies also call it the “compensating differentials” mechanism (e.g., Budig & England, 2001; Yu & Kuo, 2017).

  2. When I included inter-sector job changers, I found that private-to-public female employees enjoyed a wage increase, whereas public-to-private female employees experienced a slight wage loss due to their childbearing risks. This difference could be due to the larger motherhood wage penalty in the private sector, but also to the, on average, higher wage in the public sector. Again, whether to work per se is a possible adjustment for fertility plans.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Scott South and In Choi for their insightful comments on the earlier version of this paper. This paper was also presented at UAlbany Families Workshop. I am grateful to all the workshop members for the thought-provoking discussion.

Funding

This work received support form National Social Science Fund of China on the project understanding social values and behavioral patterns of the new generation from an intergenerational perspective (Grant No. 19ZDA145).

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  1. Department of Sociology, The State University of New York, Albany, USA

    Shichao Du

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Du, S. Childbearing Risk, Job Sectors, and the Motherhood Wage Penalty. Popul Res Policy Rev 42, 21 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-023-09763-5

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