Same-Sex and Opposite-Sex Couples and the Child Penalty

Barbara Downs, Lucia Foster, Rachel Nesbit and Danielle Sandler

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

Abstract: Existing work has shown that the entry of a child into a household results in a large and sustained increase in the earnings gap between male and female partners in opposite-sex couples. We expand this analysis of the child penalty to examine within-couple dynamics in earnings for both opposite-sex and same-sex couples in the U.S. around the time their first child enters the household. Using linked survey and administrative data and event-study methodology, we confirm earlier work finding a child penalty for women in opposite-sex couples. We find this is true even when the female partner is the primary earner pre-parenthood, lending support to the importance of gender norms in opposite-sex couples. By contrast, in both female and male same-sex couples, earnings changes associated with child entry differ by the relative pre-parenthood earnings of the partners and tend towards equalization: secondary earners see an increase in earnings, while primary earners see a small decrease.

Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2023-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-gen, nep-inv and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.census.gov/library/working-papers/2023/adrm/ces/CES-WP-23-25R.pdf Revised version, 2025 (application/pdf)
https://www2.census.gov/library/working-papers/2023/adrm/ces/CES-WP-23-25.pdf First version, 2023 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cen:wpaper:23-25

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dawn Anderson ().