The Motherhood Penalty

that hurts women's earnings more than anything else. I don't want to say that there's no sexual harassment, no gender discrimination, no bias, no absence of negotiation skills, no lack of competition for women relative to men. I never want to ignore someone's hurt in someone's stories. That's Claudia Golden. She's

an economics professor at Harvard University. She's been studying women work and pay for decades, and she says, even if we were able to magically erase workplace discrimination, harassment and all that other stuff, the gender pay gap would still exist and it would still be pretty big. But I think it's extremely important to point out what the real problem is. So what is the real problem? What Claudia calls joyful events also known as having kids, And she's

got a point. Study after study has found that the gender pay gap widens to a chasm after a woman has her first child. It's true even if she continues to work full time. It's true for women at different levels of education and income. It's true even for women with same sex partners. Over and over again, that's what the data show. It's not that women don't face discrimination or get pushed into lower paying jobs. They do, but the impact of having kids on women's earnings is way bigger.

If we take a group of women who never took time off and who don't have kids, their earnings don't seem to deviate as much from men's. The gender pay gap often gets talked about as women versus men, but really it's moms versus everyone else. We talked to a lot of moms for this season, and they'll tell you exactly why they're not making as much as men, because there are only so many hours in a day. You know. I decided to work part time so that I could

spend more time with the kids. It's definitely more challenging than I would have expected, especially as my kids become more involved in extracurricular activities. But then I feel like I'm not moving my career forward right now, and I just feel really kind of stuck. I remember my colleagues sort of ship talking somebody else who left it five and me being like, oh god, can I do that?

In general, the office is on the standing, But then, um, it's disappointing when you see a comment an annual review about how you change your hours or took a day off unpredictably. At the same time, I feel like I should be grateful because I'm lucky that I do get to work just three days a week. I want to day at home. I have small kids. They don't have a babysitter who is just able to hang out with them. I don't have the cash for that. And what's frustrating

about being working mom. I feel like I can't be doing my best at both. I actually can't really do it all, and that weighs on me. These joyful events, it turns out they're having not so joyful consequences. When you look at the world, you know what the population like, Where is our place like? Where is our value? Women deserve people for people work and nation y a comedian salary for men is greater than women In weeks six percent of major occupations when men have children, they experience

a pay bump when women have children. The opposite happens when women are financially stronger. It's good for their families, it's put money to the economy in the markets. It's good for everybody. Gender is no longer the factor creating the greatest way to discrepancy in this country. Motherhood is. For the next six weeks, we're going to investigate the impact of having kids on women's paychecks and why it's

such an important part of the gender pay gap. First, we're going to take a cold economic look at that joyful event. I know it's weird to talk about the miracle of life and economic terms, but until relatively recently, that was the full time job for a lot of women, because having kids was critical to the economic well being of families and society. Those kids worked, they joined the army, bought stuff. But when women went to work for actual money, that turned out to be good for the economy too.

When you look at American economic growth in the last century, a lot of it can be traced to women going to work on mass. But the thing is, as more women went to get paying jobs, we never stopped doing that first job. Many women now work and have kids. We call us having it all like it's an achievement or even a choice. But when we talk about having it all, what we're really talking about is having two jobs. And as anybody who has two jobs will tell you,

doing two things at once has costs. I guess I didn't realize how much work it would be, and that taking care of kids would be like a full time job that just doesn't have a salary. Balancing or managing work and family responsibilities for me has been really tricky. It's part plate spinning, part magic act, and definitely part wishful thinking. I also need coffee to make it through

a day now. Prior to having children, I consumed it here and there, but I averaged a lot less sleep, and I'm pretty much moving from five thirty in the morning until then thirty at night without a doubt. Though whenever I've hit a stride at work, someone at home would break a bone or have an allergy attack, or get an opportunity at something that they really wanted but

which required a substantial amount of support for me. And now I'm down to sixteen hours a week, and at this point I feel like I am sort of Okay. The only reason I'm able to do this is because I had a spouse who makes a decent living and he brings home the bacon. I've missed a lot of

my daughter's first birthday, for example, my son's first soccer goal. Uh. And I often feel mildly bad and sometimes tearably bad at all of the things that I care about, And I think about my priorities right now, it's work and kids, and my relationship comes comes last. And there's a fall up from that. This balancing act. It has financial consequences. It's showing up in their paychecks. Gina Smile covers economics for Bloomberg. I brought her in to tell me how

exactly this plays out. Hi, Gina, Hi, Becca, So are women just getting pregnant and taking a pay cut. It's not that simple, Okay, So tell me what is happening to women's earnings over their lifetimes. So it's pretty stark. When women first start working, they're making a little bit less than men. For college educated women, when they're twenty five, they're making on average of what men do. But by the time they're forty five, they're earning so a little

bit more than half of what amand does. So men are making almost twice as much as women do buy their mid forties. That's a huge difference. Why is such a small earnings differential exploding into this big gap. It's about what happens when women are having kids. So in Claudia Golden and two other academics tested that idea in a really novel way. They studied what happened to a group of NBA students at the University of Chicago after

they graduated. And so this is a group of competitive, ambitious people who all have pretty similar credentials a graduation. So you think that their pay would be pretty equal. Yeah. At graduation, the women in the study are earning something similar to what their classmates are making just about less. Okay, so not exactly equal. But the thing is that it got a lot worse. So nine years later, women in this study were earning two hundred and fifty thousand dollars

on average. Men we're making four hundred thousand, almost two hundred thousand dollars more. Yeah, because these are higher earners, the gaps are particularly big. But it's an example of what happens throughout the economy at different income levels. Okay, so we know this happens in this decade when women are in their twenties and thirties, also known as the

child bearing years. So what's happening. Well, A big part of the difference seems to come from job interruptions, so time out of the workforce, to drop an hour's etcetera. When a woman has a child, two things happen. She takes off at least a little time from maternity leave at a minimum, but she's also more likely to work a little bit less even after that. Maybe that's a shift of part time work, or it could just be not being on call all the time, which could matter in,

for instance, a demanding consulting job. Here's Claudie again. When I say that they've taken off some time, it's not that they've taken off a lot of time. They've taken off just a small amount of time. But the penalties it appears for deviation in the corporate and the financial sectors are extremely large. Part of it is that if you're an eye banking, you better be working very very

long hours. If you're in consulting, you better be working very long hours and rather uncontrollable, unpredictable rush, on call, etcetera. So it happens, Claudia says, is that in almost every two parent household, one of those parents is taking on the line's share of child related responsibility. In order to do that, they're having to work a little bit less.

That could mean just having a hard stop at the end of the day, you know, taking time to relieve the babysitters, or taking sick days when their kids are sick. There's nothing really special about women here except that they tend to be the on call parent. They're also the ones who are more likely to take that pay hit. Is this true everywhere? That's what the research suggests. There's a pay gap related to motherhood in many places, but

it varies in magnitude. So in Denmark, for example, women who have kids do earn less, but the gap isn't nearly as large as it is in some other places. We're looking at penalties in the long run that are larger in the UK and the US, and we're looking at child penalties and the German speaking countries that are almost three times as large. That's Henrik Clevin. He's an economist at Princeton University, and in a recent paper he compared the pay gaps across six countries Denmark, Sweden, the UK,

the US, Austria and Germany. Those countries were all interesting to Clevin because they have different public policies for working moms. Some places have paid rent to leave, others had subsidized childcare. What's interesting, though, is his research found that the differences had less to do with public policies in these given countries,

and then they did with societal expectations for women. But we hypolicize that a lot of this has to do with differences in social norms about what men and women should do after they have kids. So what's going on is that in countries where people express a strong conviction that women with young kids should stay at home, the gender pay gap is a lot bigger if you think about it. Germany has a lot of the same social

safety nets as Denmark. Women get more than a year of paid parental eave, for instance, yet they saw a pay gap for working moms that's three times as large. That is surprising that two places with generous policies for working women have such different wage outcomes for moms. Yeah, so that's where social norms come in. So Germany and Austria both have very traditional views on gender roles, at least based on this survey, and they also have bigger

motherhood related gender wage gaps. You look at countries in Scandinavia, so Denmark for example, and respondents were more comfortable with women at work, and so the wage gaps in those places, although they still exist, are a lot smaller. Does that mean that public policies are completely useless. M not necessarily, but they have a surprising perk. Here's Henrick again. So it could be that policies still have an important role

to play because they affect the social norm. If people are making less because they want to work less, that's their choice. But what merits for their examination is if women are being forced to choose between equality and motherhood. When a culture tells women that their main job is taking care of their home and their kids, well that's

what they prioritize. When women get the message that it's acceptable and even expected that they'll work outside the home, they do that too, which brings us back to having it all. Here's Cheryl Sandberg during the heyday of len In. Mothers in the United States are in the workforce because they have to be, and so telling women constantly you can't have it all, you can have it all, is

not helpful because they have to. For the last few weeks, I've been talking to women in their twenties and thirties, when their careers and prime childbearing years are just getting started. I wanted to know how ambitious women with big plans for their careers also thought about out their plans to have kids, and you can hear them wrestling with these

two conflicting ambitions. I see myself sometimes thinking I would love to be a full time mom at some point, but I think the anxiety of what if I want to return to the workforce, what does that even mean? What does that look like? I think I've always just known I've wanted to have kids has never been a question. But in terms of how it would affect my career, yeah, of course, it's going to hold you back from a

lot of things. I was a person who delayed my first pregnancy because I was always thinking about sort of a corporate calendar. Um. I was really like, oh, if I got pregnant this month, that would be after this executive meeting, before this time of year. I mean, I grew up like I think any female grew up like with society telling them that's what they're supposed to do. You went to a good school, um, and you met someone, and you had a career, and then you had kids.

I think like if I were to be a mom, I would want to be a good mom um, and I don't think with where I'm headed, I would be able to give them the kind of time that they deserve. I'm also at this exact point in my life. I'm thirty, the same age my mom was when she started her family, and just about the average age women in New York

City where I live have their first kid. Just like these women I talked to, I'm deeply ambivalent, and it feels kind of scary to say that out loud, like I'm some heartless monster for not being a hundred percent sure that I want to have kids or when when I do think about it. I know from the reporting I do and the moms, I know that there will be penalties financial but also emotional, and that having a kid will require more compromises of me than my male partner.

For a lot of women, these are good enough reasons not to have kids at all. But I'm not there yet. What I and all the other women I spoke to know in our bones is that if we want to embody both identities, have both a job, money power, financial security, and a family, something's got to give. Because even the people who seem to embody the ideal of having it all don't. Tammy Duckworth, who lost both legs in combat,

is the first disabled woman elected to Congress. She is also the first Senator to give birth while in office, and today's she helped make history again when her daughter was the first infant allowed on the Senate floor from the outside. Senator Tammy Duckworth is a picture of progress. She's a U S Senator, a war hero, and a working mother of two. She even had the Senate rules changed so now any Senator, if that's a working parent,

can bring their baby to the Senate floor. But we often spend so much time applauding Senator Duckworth's achievements that we failed to hear what she had to do to get there. So I asked her it was tough, It was misery. Um, it was just hard on me, hard on my family. But I'm so so lucky to have both my daughters, and I'm so proud to be a U S Senator. Like a lot of working women, Senator Duckworth put her career a military career first. For a

long time. She became a commissioned officer in the Army Reserves and went on to become a helicopter pilot back when it was one of the few combat jobs open to women. After she was injured in a rock she came home and ran for office. The first part of my career, I was on track to become a platoon leader and try to become a company commander and UM

operations officer and executive officer in my army unit. And none of those things I could pursue and take time off UM and mommy track and take time off to go of children. I just kept pursuing my career. And then the next thing I know, I look up and I'm thirty six years old, And what happened to my most fertile years. By the time she decided to have kids, she was forty, and by then it wasn't so easy. My guynacologist said to me, she said, you know, is

this common now? Women? We we trade our fertility for our careers early on, Well, I didn't know when I was forty and decided I was going to try to have kids and I would struggle with infertility for at least another six years. She had her first daughter when she was forty six, and then another when she was fifty. This is the point in the story where we declare, she has beaten the odds in a million different ways. She has got it all. I felt like I was

never good enough whatever I was doing. When I was with my my older daughter. I wanted to be with her, but then I felt like I was neglecting my job. As I was campaigning for the Senate, I felt like I was leaving my daughter behind it. And I mean there was even one point where I broke I'm crying during a campaign meeting where I would just so upset and mad at my staff for switching my schedule, which meant I was going to get, you know, an extra

forty five minutes less time with my daughter. And um, Finally, one of my staff members put me a science like Tammy, there's no happy medium, it's just going to suck. The senator told me a story about going back to her job while she was still nursing her infant daughter. To fully appreciate it, we need to take a quick biological aside in order to breastfeed the baby, which is what the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends. A woman's body makes milk.

If that milk doesn't get expressed multiple times a day, either by a baby's nursing or a press pump, everything goes out. At best, it's physically uncomfortable. At worst, it can make women sick and their bodies will stop making enough milk to feed their babies. For working moms, that means figuring out how to fit multiple pumping brakes into your work day or, in the editors case, a packed

campaign schedule. I breastfed my first daughter for a little over a year, and I was traveling around the country and I couldn't find a clean, safe place to express breast milk. And airports people were telling me, oh, just go use the handicap stall on the public toilet, or oh, you need to plug in your breast pump where you can go use the outlet where everyone else is charging their phones. I'm like, I'm not going to sit there and pump breastmilk next to total strangers, or or you know,

and use the toilet. Um that's discussing, Senator Duckworth wrote, impassed legislation that requires all medium and large airports to have clean private rooms where women can go breastfeed or pump while traveling. But these are the calculations working moms have to make all the time, and not just in airports, and not just when it comes to breastfeeding. Do you skip the meaning to take a pumping break? Do you

leave early to pick up your sick kid? Do you work from home and miss out on important face time? Towards the end of her first pregnancy, Senator Duckworth's doctor told her that she couldn't travel. It was too dangerous and would compromise her pregnancy. At the time, she had a job where her physical presence was required. She was a congresswoman and had to be at the US Capital to cast her votes. The Senator asked if she could vote by proxy. Her colleagues and the Democratic Party rejected

her request. They didn't want to set a precedent for everyone else who might have a doctor's note saying that they can't travel for medical reasons. They treated her like she was a worker with a rare medical emergency, not like a woman in a common and temporary biological situation. So Senator Duckworth had to miss a handful of votes. She couldn't do her job, and she's still paying for it. In the official record, Tammy Duckworth has missed twelve of

roll call votes since she's been in the Senate. That's a lot more than most of her colleagues. Here's what that stat doesn't tell you. For most of those votes, she was on maternity leave. It's hard. You try to do everything and you try to um, you know, live up to that image of what a good mom is and what a you know, good worker is in the workplace, and and I think women we tend to try to be perfect and everything and you just can't. So you have to give yourself the room to do the best

job that you can and then keep moving forward. How did we get here and what can we do about it? Well, over the next five weeks, we're going to figure this out together, because it turns out research shows that kids of working moms grow into happy adults. Their daughters are more likely to have successful careers, and their sons spend more time caring for family members. Working moms are making a path towards a more equal world for their kids,

even if they don't always feel like it. Next week on the Paycheck, how women get sidelined at work for being moms before they even have kids. You know, as the morning anchor. Viewers want to see a beauty queen. So I'm pregnant now I've gained like forty pounds. I knew it would be an issue. Thanks for listening to The Paycheck. If you like the show, please head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to rate, review, and subscribe. The show was hosted and reported by me

Rebecca Greenfield and reported by Gina Smile. This episode was edited by Janet Paskin and produced by Liz Smith. We also had production help from Francesca Levy, Jillian Goodman, and Samantha get Sick. Our original music is by Leo Sidron. Pamela Guest did the illustrations on our show page, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com Slash the Paycheck. We also want to thank the Wing for allowing us to record on site, and thank all of the moms

who took the time to speak with us. Francesca Levy is Bloomberg's head of That's