Using data on 17 countries in Europe and North America, we compare the career trajectories of mothers and fathers and of women and men without children across cohorts, and at different points of their life cycle. There is wide variation across countries in employment and earnings gaps at age 30. At age 50, however, employment between mothers and non-mothers have closed in most countries. We also observe convergence in employment gaps between mothers and fathers by age 50, but these gaps do not fully close. Motherhood gaps in earnings also close by age 50 between mothers and non-mothers, particularly among the highly educated. But there is strong persistence in earnings gaps between mothers and fathers even among highly educated parents. The main reasons for the remaining gaps at later stages in the life-cycle are part-time work among women and fatherhood premia as fathers' earnings outperform non-fathers' over their life-cycle.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.