The COVID-19 Pandemic and a Resurgence of Motherhood Wage Penalties in the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BackgroundThe total motherhood wage gap among U.S. college-educated women closed over the past two decades and was eliminated by the early 2010s. It is not clear, however, whether the COVID-19 pandemic reversed these trends.MethodsDrawing on nationally representative data from the 2000–2022 Current Population Surveys, this study uses linear regression models to estimate trends in the total motherhood wage gap among college-educated and non-college-educated women who work full-time.ResultsIn the decade leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, college-educated women with children did not pay a substantial motherhood wage penalty, but their wages began to decline at the onset of the pandemic, and the decline accelerated over the following years. By the end of 2022, college-educated women paid a 6% wage penalty for motherhood. In contrast to college-educated women, women without a college degree did not experience a substantial change in the motherhood wage penalty during the pandemic.ContributionOur study provides new evidence indicating that by 2022, three years into the pandemic, college-educated mothers experienced the highest motherhood wage penalty since the turn of the 20th century, reversing two decades of progress for this group of women. This study reveals the longer-term career-related ramifications of the pandemic for college-educated mothers and highlights the precarity of mothers’ economic progress related to external shocks, especially those that disrupt childcare and educational systems.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".