The Motherhood Penalty Hurts Us All

Kate Bahn writes about the harm of the motherhood pay penalty.

People often say, “being a mom is the most important job there is.” But being a mom can also affect your job in the labor market in important and unfair ways. The fact is that mothers do more work over all fathers and women without children, but they make less for it.

Not only do mothers work more when combining their paid work hours with their unpaid domestic work hours, but women also face wage penalties by sheer virtue of being mothers, as well as decreased lifetime earnings from increased likelihood of taking time off work for childbearing and caretaking. The compounding effects of not recognizing the impact of women’s specializing in family caretaking, the discrimination women face in the labor market because of it, and the long-term effects of both, means we devalue the women who are responsible for the continuation of society.

The above excerpt was originally published in Investopedia. Click here to view the full article.

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