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If you haven\u2019t heard, having children is expensive. As well as the eye-watering price of equipment for your new bundle of joy (strollers alone can cost around $1,000), you have to factor in the time off work to have the baby\u2014and then, women also need to consider the $17,000 they will miss out on annually after becoming a mother.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s at least according to a new Bankrate analysis<\/a> of the Census Bureau\u2019s Current Population Survey (CPS).<\/p>\n The data reveals that in 2023, full-time working mothers with children under 18 earned $55,276 annually, while fathers earned $72,280\u2014essentially 31% less than their male counterparts.<\/p>\n This discrepancy translates to $1,400 less in mothers\u2019 pockets each month,\u00a0$17,000 less a year and around a $500,000 loss over the course of a 30-year career.\u00a0<\/p>\n But of course, the average age of a first time mother is just a little older than 27 <\/a>in the U.S. and nearly 31 years old<\/a> in the U.K.\u2014meaning that with the current average retirement age of 62 and 65 respectively, most working moms will be working for at least five more years than the study suggests and accruing an even bigger loss.<\/p>\n Separate research highlights that the \u201cmotherhood penalty\u201d trap is virtually unavoidable.\u00a0<\/p>\n Douglas Almond, Yi Cheng, and Cecilia Machado examined more than 800,000 earnings reports<\/a> and found that women experience a 51% dock in pay after giving birth.\u00a0<\/p>\n It didn\u2019t matter if the mother worked for a woman or at a mostly woman-dominant firm. It also didn\u2019t matter the size of the company the mother worked for. Or if she went to college. And it didn\u2019t matter if the mother also happened to be the breadwinner in the family.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s striking about the U.S. motherhood penalty is how universal it seems,\u201d Almond told Fortune<\/em>. \u201cEven when the female partner outearns her male partner and we might expect the lower-paid dad to \u2018step up\u2019 at home, we find a still larger motherhood penalty: around 60% of earnings.\u201d<\/p>\n Not only are high-earning mothers still penalized more than lower-earning fathers, but as Bankrate\u2019s analysis highlights, men don\u2019t experience a \u201cfatherhood penalty\u201d at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n Instead, after having children, men experience a significant boost in their salary.<\/p>\n In fact, full-time working fathers with children under 18 earned about 23% more than full-time working men without children, with median wages of $72,280 compared to $58,864, respectively.<\/p>\n Assuming earnings stay the same, fathers can expect to earn $400,000 more than childless men over the course of a 30-year career.\u00a0<\/p>\n The research highlights that it\u2019s when a woman marries that cracks really begin to appear in her earning potential.<\/p>\n Full-time working single women with no children under 18 earn 93 cents on the dollar compared to their male counterparts\u2014the smallest pay gap among the groups analyzed. However, after marriage women without children earn 79 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earned in 2023.<\/p>\n Of course, not all women who marry have kids: Some are increasingly happy with a DINK (double income, no kids) lifestyle<\/a> or are childless not by choice. But, as Fortune<\/em> found, just taking your spouse\u2019s surname<\/a> is enough to signal to your boss that you may want to start a family.<\/p>\n Despite working mothers being more visible than ever before, \u201coutdated and toxic attitudes<\/a>\u201d around motherhood are still very much alive among managers.<\/p>\n Just insinuating you may one day have children is enough to be consigned to the \u201cmommy track\u201d.<\/p>\n Lauren Tetenbaum, a lawyer-turned-social worker, told Fortune <\/em>that women are \u201cafraid\u201d to even inquire about a company\u2019s parental leave policy: \u201cIt\u2019s this unspoken secret that if they ask about it, even if they\u2019re seeking information, they\u2019ll be discriminated against.\u201d<\/p>\n Unfortunately, this only gets worse when women do become pregnant; An ex-Peloton director told Fortune<\/em> that disclosing her pregnancy killed her job prospects<\/a> and a marketer echoed that she was compared to a broken race car<\/a> as her pregnancy progressed.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Plus, even when the baby bump disappears, research shows that outdated stereotypes continue to follow women well into motherhood and have a tangible impact on their long-term trajectory at work.<\/p>\n Douglas Almond, Yi Cheng, and Cecilia Machado found that six years after the first child\u2019s birth, the pay gap between father and mother had actually increased.\u00a0Meanwhile, Princeton University and the London School of Economics <\/a>collected data from 134 countries and concluded that the Motherhood Penalty can still impact women\u2019s careers 10 years after giving birth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nMeanwhile fathers see their salaries increase<\/h2>\n
The \u2018mommy track\u2019<\/h2>\n