Three years ago we shared the results of a study by Kleven, Landais and Søgaard (2018) with data from Denmark on the so-called “child penalty”. It showed that 80% of the gender gap in wages that exists today in the Nordic country is due to having children. Having a child does not harm the careers of fathers, but it does harm that of mothers, who at 10 years after the birth of the first child earned 19% less than men (they also work fewer hours), and whose economic and economic collapse professional gets worse with each new child.
Spain. Although we knew that this effect was also manifested in other countries, we lacked the national analysis. According to the results of the study by Quinto, Hospido and Sanz (2021), the average wage gap for Spanish women in the long term is similar to that experienced in Sweden or the United States, although less than in the United Kingdom, Germany, or Austria (On the latter two, there is a short-term penalty of almost 80% and a long-term penalty of 51 and 61% respectively).
At age 10:
✔️ Gross income: women lose 33%. Men, -5%✔️ Hours worked: women, -26%, men, 0.
✔️ Part-time employment: women 43% more likely than men
✔️ Fixed contract: women probability 29%; men falls to -6%. pic.twitter.com/K5MX1drINM
– Juan Luis Jiménez (@JuanLuis_JG) September 5, 2021
How much less does the working mother earn? Crossing Social Security records, researchers have found that within the first year of having the first child, the mother’s gross income falls, on average, by 11.4% compared to what she earned before having it while the father’s salary is reduced. maintains. At age 10, the penalty per child rises to 28% with what he earned before the first child. All this leads to the fact that, when the first child is 10 years old, the income of mothers is on average 33% lower than that of fathers. This effect does not return to recover in the rest of their work stage.
Less money for fewer hours. This economic loss is revealed, above all, by the loss of productivity of the mother. These women reduce their number of hours worked after the first childbirth (26% fewer hours than before), while men do not. They are also more likely to choose to work part-time (46% more likely than before) or to cut their hours. Finally, they are more conducive than before giving birth to enter fixed-term jobs (29% more), which, in fact, is subverted for men, who opt for them 6% less than before. This is how it is seen that the workload for the child falls practically exclusively on the woman.
Not all mothers are the same. In this we do differ from other studies such as Denmark. Here there is an added class gap between women with a high level of education versus those with low education. A woman with a degree ends up losing fewer days of work and, therefore, less salary, than those in basic studies, who also tend to work more on fixed-term and part-time contracts.
Where do we come from, where do we go The activity rate of men of working age has remained almost stable between 2007 and 2019 (82.6% to 79.9%, as we can see, in fact, it has fallen a little) and that of women has increased (from 62.8% to 70.1%). In this sense, we are making adequate progress towards equality, but this is not and has not been guaranteed. There have been structural pitfalls, for example, the disparity in paternity and maternity leave: just 14 years ago parents had only two days for the birth of a child, and in 2018 they only had five weeks, climbing from there to the current 16, being 2021 the first year in which they are identical for mothers and fathers.
But those first few months aren’t everything. As can be seen, part-time work is almost six times more frequent among women (23% of workers) than among men (4%). As has been seen throughout this analysis, the burden of caring for children and the home has a lot to do with all of this.
The other contexts: there are other interesting data regarding the wage gaps of our time. It turns out that, with data from the United States, single women and men earn less, on average, than their counterparts who are married, a phenomenon that is believed to be explained by so-called marital “selectivity”. In other ways, while women have increased their status, men have become a little more “mediocre.” Also, that women with high incomes have much higher divorce rates, an effect that does not occur among men.
Photo: Charles Deluvio.