Motherhood timing and the child penalty
by Anikó Bíró
The age at which women have their first child has risen substantially over the past decades. This is often seen as beneficial for women’s careers, since delaying motherhood gives women more time to complete their education, gain work experience, and establish themselves professionally. But does having children later actually reduce the career and earnings costs of motherhood? In our new study, “Motherhood timing and the child penalty,” we examine this question using detailed administrative data from Austria.
Our main finding is that delaying motherhood brings economic benefits, but mainly because it postpones the career consequences of having children rather than substantially reducing them.
We find that women who have their first child later tend to have higher earnings after giving birth. A simple comparison suggests that each additional year of delay is associated with around 4.6% higher earnings five years after the first birth. However, this does not mean that delaying motherhood makes the earnings disadvantage associated with motherhood 4.6% smaller. Some of this difference simply reflects the fact that women are older and have had more time to build their careers. After accounting for these factors, the effect of delaying motherhood on the earnings disadvantage is much smaller. This disadvantage averages 67%, while delaying motherhood by one year changes it by only around –0.6 to 0.7 percentage points.
The key distinction is therefore between postponing the career consequences of motherhood and reducing them. Women who delay motherhood can spend more years building their careers before having children. For Austrian women born between 1957 and 1962, delaying the first birth by one year is associated with about 2.4% higher career earnings. Much of this gain—around 1.4%—can be explained by shifting a relatively persistent earnings disadvantage to a later stage of the career. This suggests that even if much of the effect of delaying motherhood comes from postponing a relatively persistent disadvantage (“penalty”), the timing of motherhood remains an important contributor to gender inequality over the course of a career.
The broader message is that timing matters, but timing alone does not eliminate the economic consequences of motherhood. Delaying motherhood can improve women’s lifetime earnings by allowing them to accumulate more experience and earnings before having children. But the career disadvantage associated with motherhood remains remarkably persistent, even when women have children later.
Reference: Bíró, A., Dieterle, S. & Steinhauer, A. Motherhood timing and the child penalty. Journal of Population Economics, Volume 39, article number 44 (2026)https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-026-01189-5
