Pregnancy and Employment: A Literature Review - Crisis Pregnancy ...

Pregnancy and Employment: A Literature Review
to progress in their careers and are thus in a better position to resist occupational downgrading and declines in
earnings – for example, because they have built up better leave entitlements and because their accumulated
human capital makes it more difficult for employers to replace them. This counter-intuitive result may partly arise
because Beblo and Wolf’s analysis is confined to women with high qualifications; they find that, surprisingly, there
are no significant wage returns for experience among their low-skilled group of women (ibid, p. 203). In contrast,
Taniguchi (1999) found that, in the US, the wage effects of childbearing were greatest for women who gave birth
relatively early (age 20-27), in a period that was seen to be a crucial stage for career building. The effect was weaker
for both teenage mothers and those giving birth later.
Also in the US, Waldfogel (1997b) reports that the pay gap between mothers and non-mothers was around 10%
to 15% in the late 1990s. Waldfogel highlights that this gap widened over time, and that a strong pay penalty for
women having children persists even after one controls for differences in education, overall work experience,
and full and part-time work experience. Therefore, the penalty cannot simply be attributed to difference in the
length of time out of the labour market. Nor is it due to unobserved differences between the two groups, which
was tested using a fixed-effects model. Waldfogel argues that part of the answer lies in the lack of job-protected
maternity leave in the US. Women who were provided with maternity cover and used it to return to their previous
employer had wages about as high as those who never had children at all. Additional support for institutional
explanations comes from research which shows that there is no significant pay gap between mothers and other
women in Sweden (Albrecht et al, 1999) or Denmark (Rosholm & Smith, 1996) which both have extensive maternity
and childcare supports (see Banks and Russell, 2011; Gornick & Meyers, 2003).
Evidence for the UK provides a more mixed account of the role of policy. Despite the introduction of equalopportunity
and family-friendly policies, Joshi et al (1999) found the same unadjusted ‘family gap’ in wages
between mothers and non-mothers in 1978 and 1991. In both years human-capital characteristics, including
experience, accounted for around 70% of the gap and there was no significant direct motherhood penalty when
characteristics were controlled for within part-timers and full-timers. However, the penalties associated with
lost work experience increased over the period. Joshi et al also conclude that the concentration of mothers in
lower-paying part-time jobs became more prominent in explaining the family gap over time (ibid, 1999, p549) and
that there was an increasing penalty for part-time work. However, extensions to maternity-leave provision were
attributed to the absence of any pay difference between mothers who returned to work within one year of the
birth and childless women.
The research outlined in section 4.2 above highlighted the role of part-time working in women’s occupational
downgrading, a similar process may also contribute to the motherhood pay penalty. The effects of working
part-time on earnings depend on the employment regime of the country in question. This applies both to the
current wages of those working part-time (Bardasi & Gornick, 2000) and also to the longer-term wage effects of
periods of part-time work on subsequent earnings. In the US, Corcoran and Duncan (1979) found that periods of
part-time work reduced female earnings and explained a significant proportion of the gender pay gap. In Britain,
Connolly and Gregory (2009) found that women who switched from full to part-time work experienced a marked
drop in hourly earnings (32%), which was associated with occupational downgrading. 42 This immediate drop
was followed by a permanently lower earnings trajectory, which means that without a return to full-time work,
earnings losses continue to grow. However, Beblo and Wolf (2002) found no wage depreciation for part-time work
experience in the Netherlands. This is in the context where part-time work is extremely common for both Dutch
men and women, where there is a statutory entitlement to work part-time, and part-time workers enjoy strong
employment protection.
Very little research has been conducted to assess the extent to which the wage penalties attached to time out
of the labour market are justified in terms of depreciation in skills. Albrecht et al (1999) find differential effects for
various forms of labour-market interruption in Sweden, with larger depreciation for time spent in childcare than for
other forms of economic inactivity and unemployment. They conclude that the wage penalty cannot be attributed
to the depreciation in human capital. Further comparative research would shed some light on this topic since
there is little a priori reason to expect women’s skills to depreciate quicker in one country than in another (holding
factors such as education constant).
42 This study follows on from Connolly & Gregory (2008) described above and analyses the same dataset the NESPD. They restrict the analysis to
women with at least three years in work starting from their first year working full-time, and to women aged 16 to 43 years.
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