Having children is costly. It costs money, time, resources, and energy. Yet women and men do not share these costs equally. Women tend to bear the greatest burden. After the birth of their first child, women spend more time on unpaid childcare and less time on paid employment than men. This can have large long-term effects on the economic opportunities available to men and women. In other words, women face an ‘penalty’ from having children, while men do not. Some researchers call this the ‘child penalty’.
How can we measure this? One way is to look at the earnings or employment of women and men around the birth of their first child and see what happens to women’s employment relative to men. When we do this, we see that there is a large and persistent child penalty for women. In Denmark, women’s earnings 10 years after the birth of their first child are 20 percent lower than they would have been if they hadn’t had children.
Source: Child Penalty Atlas
In Uruguay, 31% of women withdraw from the labor market in the first year; at five and ten years, 39% are absent.
The “motherhood penalty” in Uruguay is equal to the average for Latin American countries (within the margin of error). There are significant differences in wage recovery ten years after the birth of the first child compared to other regions.
