The Motherhood Penalty—Understanding the Gendered Role of Motherhood in the Life Histories of Incarcerated South African Women

The number of incarcerated women in South Africa has steadily increased over the last decade. However, as a minority in the carceral population of the country, their narratives are underrepresented. An emergent body of feminist, gender responsive research has found that motherhood is central to the narratives of incarcerated women. This study endeavored to document the life histories of 17 women who are incarcerated in the largest correctional center in South Africa. The narratives of these women explicate how the gendered role of motherhood impacted on their incarceration pathways, contributing to the developing literature of justice-involved women in South Africa.

Does signaling childcare support on job applications reduce the motherhood penalty?

There is substantial evidence that due to perceived childcare obligations, mothers are disadvantaged in labor markets. To what extent can childcare support ameliorate such a disadvantage? To answer this question, we ran a CV experiment in a large Indian city and examined whether indicating access to childcare support in a CV may offset the motherhood penalty associated with labor market entry. We randomly varied motherhood, as well as access to childcare in CVs sent to online applications for service sector jobs in Delhi. Indicating motherhood on a CV led to a 57% or 20 percentage point reduction in callback rates for interviews as compared to non-mothers. A simple indication of access to childcare support offsets the motherhood penalty by 20% or 4 percentage points. We interpret the findings in the Indian context and with respect to potential sources of discrimination.

Motherhood Penalties and Fatherhood Premiums: Effects of Parenthood on Earnings Growth Within and Across Firms

Despite much interest in how parenthood contributes to the gender pay gap, prior research has rarely explored firms' roles in shaping the parenthood pay penalty or premium. The handful of studies that investigated parenthood's effects within and across firms generally compared parents and their childless peers at a given time and failed to account for unobserved heterogeneity between the two groups. Such comparisons also cannot inform how having children may alter individuals' earnings trajectories within and across firms. Using 26 rounds of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and fixed-effects models, we examine how being a mother or father is linked to earnings growth within and across firms. We find that women's pay decreases as they become mothers and that the across-employer motherhood penalty is larger than the within-employer penalty. By contrast, fatherhood is associated with a pay premium, and the within-employer fatherhood premium is considerably greater than the across-employer one. We argue that these results are consistent with the discrimination explanation of the motherhood penalty and fatherhood premium. Because employers are likely to trust women who become mothers while working for them more than new recruits who are mothers, their negative bias against mothers would be more salient when evaluating the latter, which could result in a larger between-organizational motherhood penalty. Conversely, employers' likely greater trust in existing workers who become fathers than fathers they hire from elsewhere may amplify their positive bias favoring fathers in assessing the former, which could explain the greater within-firm fatherhood premium.

Moving Beyond Linear Regression: Implementing and Interpreting Quantile Regression Models with Fixed Effects

Quantile regression (QR) provides an alternative to linear regression (LR) that allows for the estimation of relationships across the distribution of an outcome. However, as highlighted in recent research on the motherhood penalty across the wage distribution, different procedures for conditional and unconditional quantile regression (CQR, UQR) often result in divergent findings that are not always well understood. In light of such discrepancies, this paper reviews how to implement and interpret a range of LR, CQR, and UQR models with fixed effects. It also discusses the use of Quantile Treatment Effect (QTE) models as an alternative to overcome some of the limitations of CQR and UQR models. We then review how to interpret results in the presence of fixed effects based on a replication of Budig and Hodges's (2010) work on the motherhood penalty using NLSY79 data.