Which Mothers Pay a Higher Price? Education Differences in Motherhood Wage Penalties by Parity and Fertility Timing

Upon becoming mothers, women often experience a wage decline—a “motherhood wage penalty.” Recent scholarship suggests the penalty’s magnitude differs by educational attainment. Yet education is also predictive of when women have children and how many they have, which can affect the wage penalty’s size too. Using fixed-effects models and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, I estimate heterogeneous effects of motherhood by parity and by age at births, considering how these relationships differ by education. For college graduates, first births were associated with a small wage penalty overall, but the penalty was larger for earlier first births and declined with higher ages at first birth. Women who delayed fertility until their mid-30s reaped a premium. Second and third births were associated with wage penalties. Less educated women instead faced a wage penalty at all births and delaying fertility did not minimize the penalty.

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