Enfants, interruptions d'activité des femmes et écart de salaire entre les sexes

The article presents an analysis of the impact of children on wages in terms of the family gap in pay. After a brief presentation of the main empirical results and theoretical explanations that can be found in international literature, it analyzes, for France, the effects children have on women?s professional life and proposes a measure of their impact on wages of women and men in their forties. Having children does not seem to have a direct influence on women?s hourly wages, but children related employment interruptions and part-time work have a negative effect on pay and explain the wage gap between women who have interrupted their activity and women who have remained in the labor market. We compare also, within the same age group, the wages of women continuously active and men; here, the wage gap remains mostly unexplained by differences in individual characteristics. This result shows that an effect of children is the suspicion employers might have that women are firstly mothers (or mothers to be) and, as such, are likely to be less involved in their career than men. JEL classification codes: J13, J16, J24, J31.