The Motherhood Penalty Hits Women’s Academic Careers Hard, According to a New Study
Women are 29% less likely to remain at universities eight years after having a first child, with lasting impacts on pay, tenure and research output, a large Danish study has found.
More than two decades ago, researchers coined the term “motherhood penalty” to describe the systemic losses — in pay, benefits, responsibility and opportunity — that women often face after becoming parents.
Quantifying those losses, however, has long proved difficult, particularly when it comes to measuring missed opportunities or demonstrating the subtle ways careers can be derailed.
Now, a large-scale study conducted in Denmark offers one of the clearest pictures yet of how steep that penalty may be — at least within academia.
The researchers analyzed data from more than 13,000 parents who had enrolled in Ph.D. programs at Danish universities between 1996 and 2017. All had their first child after the first year of their doctoral studies. They then linked these records to publication histories from a major citation database, as well as responses from a 2017 survey covering career aspirations, work-life balance and childcare.
The results point to a stark gender divide. Eight years after the birth of a first child, women were 29% less likely to remain employed at a university than comparable women who did not have children. For men who became fathers, the drop was 14%.
Mothers who left academia also experienced a 12% reduction in earnings and were less likely to hold roles at research institutes or laboratories. The authors write that this pattern suggests many women not only exit academia, but also step away from research altogether.
Among those who remained in academia, gender differences in career progression were also evident. Mothers saw a substantial decline in their chances of securing tenure: The likelihood fell by 35% three to four years after the birth of a first child, and remained 23% lower after eight years compared with women without children. Fathers, by contrast, experienced no significant change in their chances of obtaining tenure.
The frequency that mothers had published work followed a similar pattern. Fathers maintained their publication rates after becoming parents, whereas mothers experienced a marked decline. Eight years after the birth of their first child, mothers had, on average, 31% fewer publications than fathers.
Barbara Petrongolo, an economist at the University of Oxford in the U.K., told the journal, Nature, that she considered the findings to be “extremely rich” and “quite striking.” Although other studies have quantified gender gaps in academia and other professional spheres, the study is notable because Denmark has a relatively high level of gender equality compared with other countries around the world. The findings thus suggest that even in more egalitarian systems, parenthood can have markedly different career consequences for women and men.
