New research from the Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences (PNAS) suggests that mothers are immediately and substantially impacted at work the moment they become a parent.
The arrival of a firstborn child doesn’t have any effect on a man’s earnings, moms experience a 51% dock in pay, equivalent to an average of $8,000 annually, an analysis of the report says.
It continued: The motherhood penalty only persisted as the child aged; researchers found that six years after the first child’s birth, the pay gap between father and mother increased slightly.
The “motherhood penalty” it speaks of is America’s cultural stereotypes regarding work and parenthood, the researchers coined.
“What’s striking about the U.S. motherhood penalty is how universal it seems,” Almond tells Fortune in a July 18 report. “Even when the female partner outearns her male partner and we might expect the lower-paid dad to ‘step up’ at home, we find a still larger motherhood penalty: around 60% of earnings.”
“There is a culture of U.S. dads not contributing as much childcare as in other countries,” he continued, pointing to his own experience as a father. While based…
