There is a valley of death in the pay and work world for women. It begins with childbirth and it ends … actually, it doesn’t end. The pay gap between men and women jumps from 10-cents on the dollar for those between the ages of 25 and 34, to 19-cents for those between 35 and 44, and it stays in that range until retirement.
In a recent Third Way report, we dissected the gender pay gap every way we could. We found no single root cause. Instead, there were multiple explanations that each account for a portion of the gap, from occupational discrepancies to outright discrimination. A substantial portion, though, comes from the subtle effects and biases that occur from bearing a child and the different ways the job market values fathers and mothers. Spoiler alert: there’s a motherhood penalty of about 4% for each child, according to a detailed study from Michelle Budig of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
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