Does Biology Drive Child Penalties? Evidence from Biological and Adoptive Families

Abstract

This paper investigates whether the impact of children on the labor market outcomes of women relative to men—child penalties—can be explained by the biological links between mother and child. We estimate child penalties in biological and adoptive families using event studies around the arrival of children and almost 40 years of adoption data from Denmark. Short-run child penalties are slightly larger for biological mothers than for adoptive mothers, but their long-run child penalties are virtually identical and precisely estimated. This suggests that biology is not a key driver of child-related gender gaps. (JEL J12, J13, J16)

Motherhood and the Allocation of Talent

“…Our estimates of short-and long-run motherhood effects on the probability of working, -25% for τ = 1 and -21% for τ = 15 (see Figure 1a), fall close to the upper end of the [-40%,-20%] interval found in the literature (Kleven et al, 2019b;Kleven et al, 2019a;Kuziemko et al, 2018;Berniell et al, 2021;and Kleven et al, 2021). 14,15 Our results also point to a sharp increase, larger than 50%, of both parttime employment and self-employment immediately after the birth of the first child.…”

“…On the one hand, the more classical explanation of comparative advantages based on mother's biological link to their children does not seem to hold. According to Kleven et al (2021), motherhood effects are virtually identical when comparing biological and adoptive mothers, ruling out the potential effects induced by physical changes. Moreover, it would be difficult to reconcile the claim of biological differences driving comparative advantages with the wide range of variability in the effects of motherhood that we find across countries, even when comparing individuals with similar skills.…”

School Schedule and the Gender Pay Gap

“…The parenting-work conflict and its relationship with gender inequality is a source of continuous debate in most advanced economies. An increasing number of studies show that the gender pay gap between parents emerges after the birth of the first child, and tends to persist over time, even when children grow up (Angelov, Johansson and Lindahl 2016, Kleven and Landais 2017, Chung et al 2017, Kuziemko et al 2018, Kleven, Landais and Sogaard 2019 Nix 2020, Kleven, Landais and Søgaard 2020). Less is known about the factors that explain such persistence, especially in countries characterized by high female labor force participation (Bertrand, Goldin andKatz 2010, Le Barbanchon, Rathelot andRoulet 2019, Petrongolo and Ronchi forthcoming).…”

Women and men at work

“…We do not have any evidence that men and women differ in their productivity at childcare and domestic work, and indeed it seems likely that differences at a particular point in time are more the result of differences in the acquired experience doing such tasks than pre-existing differences. In particular, Kleven, Landais and Søgaard (2021) show that evidence does not support childbearing and breastfeeding being a key source of comparative advantage driving the observed differences in labour market outcomes between mothers and fathers after the arrival of children. They document that child penalties are virtually identical in couples whose first child is a biological child and in couples whose first child is adopted.…”