Find Out How Having a Baby Can Affect a Woman’s Wages With This Calculator
This is called child punishment: women who work with children tend to earn less than their counterparts without children. For some groups, however, having a baby is actually a bonus, as some moms earn more than their peers.
The Washington Post calculator is based on census data and the work of Columbia University researchers Jane Waldvogel and Ipshita Pal. Select demographics to compare the difference in wages for working mothers and women without children.
It is believed that having children is one of the reasons why women earn 79 cents for every dollar a man earns: even when women continue to work after having children, they tend to do most of raising children and this affects wages (e.g. , women put their careers on hold to take care of young children and then fall behind when they come back to work).
However, there is good news here, at least for some moms. Certain groups, especially white women and married women, as well as women with college degrees, seem to earn more than similar working women without children. The biggest contributor to this, the Washington Post suggests, is the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), introduced in 1993. It gives new parents (in companies with more than 50 employees) three months of unpaid leave and a guarantee that they will still last. be work waiting for them. Fathers also receive leave, which helps married women to continue their work and, possibly, avoid punishment for the child. (Also, the article does not mention this, but more and more men are becoming housefathers, who undoubtedly help mothers in their careers.) Unmarried women may not have this kind of support and, therefore, punishment for a child.
The US still has a long way to go when it comes to family labor law. This calculator is a reminder of that, as well as some encouragement that things are doing better for some.
Find out how much having a baby affects your salary with our simple calculator | Washington Post