Women, work, and motherhood: changing employment penalties for motherhood in West Germany after 1945 - a comparative analysis of cohorts born in 1934-1971

Stefan Bender (), Annette Kohlmann and Stefan Lang
Additional contact information
Annette Kohlmann: Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany

No WP-2003-006, MPIDR Working Papers from Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany

Abstract: This paper deals with the effects of entry into motherhood on women’s employment dynamics. Our analysis is based on the complete lifetime working- and income histories of a 1% sample of all persons born between 1934 and 1971 and employed in West Germany sometime between 1975 and 1995. We use the records of women who were employed before the birth of their first child. We apply a semi-parametric hierarchical Bayesian modeling approach simultaneously including several time scales and further covariates whose effects we estimate by MCMC techniques. We investigate short-term consequences of entry into motherhood and their changes over different birth cohorts and thereby take into account the employment histories before the birth of the first child. We conduct two models differentiating between the simple return to the labor market and the return for at least a certain period in order to measure subsequent employment stability. Our results indicate that a higher extent of employment experience, a stronger attachment to the labor market and an employment in white collar jobs reduces the employment penalty for mothers after the birth of their first child.

JEL-codes: J1 Z0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2003
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2003-006.pdf (application/pdf)

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:dem:wpaper:wp-2003-006

DOI: 10.4054/MPIDR-WP-2003-006

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPIDR Working Papers from Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Wilhelm ().