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Money, Birth, Gender: Explaining Unequal Earnings Trajectories following Parenthood

By on May 17, 2023 in Articles

Weverthon Machado, Eva Jaspers

Sociological Science May 17, 2023
10.15195/v10.a14

Abstract

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Using population register data from the Netherlands, we analyze the child penalty for new parents in three groups of couples: different-sex and female same-sex couples with a biological child and different-sex couples with an adopted child. With a longitudinal design, we follow parents’ earnings from two years before to eight years after the arrival of the child and use event study models to estimate the effects of the transition to parenthood on earnings trajectories. Comparing different groups of couples allows us to test hypotheses related to three types of within-couple differences that are difficult to disentangle when studying only heterosexual biological parents: relative earnings, childbearing, and gender. Our results offer strong support for gender as the main driver of divergent child penalties. The gender of their partners is more consequential for mothers’ earnings trajectories than is childbearing or the pre-parenthood relative earnings in the couple.
Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Weverthon Machado: Corresponding author. Department of Sociology, Utrecht University
E-mail: w.barbosamachado@uu.nl

Eva Jaspers: Department of Sociology, Utrecht University
E-mail: e.jaspers@uu.nl

Acknowledgments: We are grateful for valuable feedback from members of the GENPARENT project, namely, Marie Evertsson, Maaike van der Vleuten, Ylva Moberg, Allison Geerts, and Madeleine Eriksson Kirsch. Previous versions of his article were presented at theWork and Family seminar of the Department of Sociology at Utrecht University, the Inter-university Working Group on Social Inequality and Life Courses (ISOL), the Work and Family Researchers Network (WFRN) conference 2022, the European Population Conference (EPC) 2022, the European Consortium for Sociological Research (ECSR) conference 2022, and the ODISSEI Conference for Social Science in the Netherlands 2022. We thank participants in these sessions for their comments and suggestions.

Funding: This work was funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, ERC Consolidator Grant (no. 771770) awarded to principal investigator Marie Evertsson. We also benefited from the support of ODISSEI, the Open Data Infrastructure for Social Science and Economic Innovations.

Data availability: We use population register data provided by Statistics Netherlands. The data are not publicly available, but interested researchers can, subject to eligibility, apply for access. See instructions at https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/onze-diensten/customised-services-microdata/microdata-conducting-your-own-research. Code for reproducing our analyses is available at https://osf.io/gmcjv/.

Supplemental Material

  • Citation: Machado, Weverthon, and Eva Jaspers. 2023. “Money, Birth, Gender: Explaining Unequal Earnings Trajectories following Parenthood.” Sociological Science 10: 429-453.
  • Received: January 3, 2023
  • Accepted: March 21, 2023
  • Editors: Ari Adut, Vida Maralani
  • DOI: 10.15195/v10.a14


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