Series: Occasional Papers. 2017.
Author: Alicia de Quinto, Laura Hospido and Carlos Sanz.
Published in:
SERIEs-Journal of the Spanish Economic Association Volume 12, pp 585–606, December 2021
Full document
Abstract
The role of parenthood in the gender pay gap has been extensively discussed in the
literature. Using data from social security records, we adopt the methods used for other
countries to evaluate the existence of a child penalty in Spain, looking at disparities for
women and men across different labor outcomes following the birth of the first child. Our
findings suggest that, the year after the first child is born, mothers’ annual earnings drop
by 11 percent while men’s remain unaffected. The gender gap is even larger ten years after
the birth. Our estimate of the long-run child penalty in earnings equals 28 percent, similar
in magnitude to that found for Sweden and Denmark, and smaller than in the UK, the US,
Germany, and Austria. In addition, we identify channels that may drive this phenomenon,
including reductions in working days and shifts to part-time or fixed-term contracts. Finally,
we encounter heterogeneous responses in earnings and labor market participation by
educational level: college-educated women react to motherhood more on the intensive
margin (working part-time), while non-college-educated women are relatively more likely to
do so in the extensive margin (working fewer days).