Employment adjustments around childbirth: How high skilled mothers smooth their careers

Abstract

In many European countries the labor market is segmented into public and private sectors. The public sector is considered to be family friendly and allow for combing motherhood and career. In this paper, we take advantage of the Danish administrative records to show that high-skilled women adjust work conditions after giving birth to their first child by changing the employment sector and thus smooth earnings consequences of maternity. In particular, switching from private to public sector is most frequent for high skilled professionals in occupations with low freedom to make decisions and with high time pressure. This specific brain-drain can explain why we observe high gender wage gaps in occupations with convex pay schemes. Further, our estimates of the motherhood wage gap suggest that women who switch from private to public sector lose the least on their post-motherhood wage gap due to motherhood in each respective post-birth year, while women who stay in the private sector are building up the most on their pre-motherhood wage gap. (Paper by: Nabanita Datta Guptaa, Filip Pertolda,, Barbara Pertold-Gebickaca).

Nabanita Datta Gupta

is Professor at Department of Economics and Business, Aarhus University, past member of the Danish Social Science Research Council. Her PhD is in Labor Economics from Cornell University, 1992. Her research interests include gender wage differentials, discrimination, education, occupational choice, retirement and pension systems, health economics and microeconometric analyses of economic development.

See further info: pure.au.dk/portal/da/ndg@econ.au.dk