Is employment during motherhood a ‘value changing experience’?

Mireia Borrell Porta, Valentina Contreras Silva and Joan Costa-Font

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We study whether the experience of ‘employment during motherhood’ (EDM) exerts an effect on attitudes towards the welfare effects of EDM, which proxy gender norms with regards to employment. We examine unique evidence from a large, representative, and longitudinal data set that collects attitudinal data over about a decade in the United Kingdom. We draw on an instrumental variable (IV) strategy that exploits variation in local labour markets using a Bartik instrument for employment to address the potential endogeneity of EDM experience in explaining attitudes. We find that both childless women who work and mothers who do not work are more likely to agree with the statement that ’pre-school children suffer if their mothers work’, which we interpret as more traditional gender values. However, this is not the case for women who work and have children. These findings suggest that motherhood confirms individuals’ priors, and suggest that EDM is a value preserving rather than a value changing experience. These results suggest that the so-called ‘motherhood penalty’ in employment trajectories cannot be fully explained by a change in attitudes after giving birth.

Keywords: attitude formation; children; confirmation bias; later life attitudes; value changing experiences; women employment after maternity; women employment attitudes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 9 pages
Date: 2023-06-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-eur
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Published in Advances in Life Course Research, 1, June, 2023, 56. ISSN: 1040-2608

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:118054

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