IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/cambje/v23y1999i5p543-64.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Wages of Motherhood: Better or Worse?

Author

Listed:
  • Joshi, Heather
  • Paci, Pierella
  • Waldfogel, Jane

Abstract

Data from two British cohort studies show that women with children have lower wages than childless women. We develop an innovative decomposition of this 'family gap'. The crude pay gap between mothers and childless women in their thirties was similar in 1978 and 1991, but low pay in part-time work became more important in explaining this gap, and human capital less so. We find that, among full-time employees, women who broke their employment at childbirth were subsequently paid less than childless women. In contrast, mothers who maintained employment continuity were as well paid as childless women, but neither were as well remunerated as men. Copyright 1999 by Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Joshi, Heather & Paci, Pierella & Waldfogel, Jane, 1999. "The Wages of Motherhood: Better or Worse?," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 23(5), pages 543-564, September.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:23:y:1999:i:5:p:543-64
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:23:y:1999:i:5:p:543-64. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/cje .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.