The “Other” Child Penalty: Work Disability after Motherhood and How Paternity Leave Can Help

The paper summarized here provides a comprehensive view on how having children impacts awoman’s professional career. As such, it builds on existing studies that highlight the impact ofmotherhood on gender inequalities in the labor market, often called “child penalties” (Kleven etal, 2019). These two researchers are the first to evaluate the child penalty in the Belgian context,which amounts to a 43% long-run reduction in their earnings for women up to 8 years after thebirth of their first child.The study also highlights the existence of “another” child penalty by showing that Belgianmothers are also more likely than fathers to experience work disability after enteringparenthood. This long-run gap in work disability prevalence tends to increase with the numberof children, suggesting that it could result from family arrangements detrimental to women.Finally, the authors show that the provision of a two-week paternity leave can help lessen these“child penalties”. By exploiting a legislative reform in 2002, the researchers demonstrate thatthe introduction of paternity leave reduced the time spent by mothers on disability insurance by21% over a period of 12 years.