The impact of postponing motherhood on women's income in Brazil

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of the postponement of motherhood on women’s earnings and gender gap in Brazilian labor market, based on data from Brazilian National Health Survey of 2013. Using the Heckman (1979) approach, the results suggest that postponing motherhood has a positive impact of 1.55% on earnings each year of postponement. By comparing men and women, the results suggest that being a woman generates a wage penalty of approximately 22%, but the postponing of motherhood can eliminate that gender gap, especially for those who are white, yellow, and higher educated.