The Motherhood Wage Penalty and Its Determinants: A Public-Private Comparison
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, we investigate whether public and private sector employees bear a different wage penalty from having children. Using data from the “Families and Employers ” survey, we are able to address three potential biases: self-selection into employment, self-selection into sectors, and unobserved heterogeneity. We obtain the following four main results. First, we find no wage penalty associated with one child, namely, only mothers of two or more children experience a motherhood penalty. Second, the total wage penalty from having two or more children is much larger in the private sector than in the public sector. Third, in both sectors, we find no unexplained penalty once we control for all the potential determinants of the family pay gap, namely, a reduced labour supply of mothers, child-related career interruptions, less access to management positions, and adjustments in working conditions. Fourth, among the potential determinants of the family pay gap, only child-related career interruptions play a different role in explaining the motherhood penalty in each sector. Indeed, child-related career interruptions are much more frequent and harmful in the private sector than in the public sector.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".