Motherhood and Constraints during Job Search

Daphné Skandalis and Arnaud Philippe

No 26129, RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin)

Abstract: Why do women's labor earnings drop upon motherhood? We shed new light on this question by analyzing the changes in job search behavior associated with motherhood. We exploit data on the job applications sent on a popular online platform linked with administrative registers for 350,000 involuntarily unemployed workers in France. After losing their job, mothers have a 11.7% lower probability to find a job than similar women without children and send 12.2% fewer job applications. To explore the underlying mechanisms, we analyze the timing of job applications. Unlike other women, mothers' rate of applications decreases by about 20.5% in the hours when there is no school. Moreover, the French reform that introduced school on Wednesday in 2014 led mothers to send more applications on Wednesdays. Our results highlight that childcare creates constraints on the timing of job search activities for mothers. We finally provide suggestive evidence that these constraints decrease their return-to-search, and thereby contribute to their lower application and job finding rates.

Keywords: Gender inequality; Motherhood; Time allocation; Job search (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J22 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-gen
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