Duration:
Since 01 July 2020

Research Team:
(Head of project)
Prof. Dr. Wiebke Schulz (Head of project)
Bernhard Zangl (Head of project)

Mothers tend to earn less, have lower status and fewer chances for promotion than childless women; this motherhood penalty has been robustly established across a wide range of countries (England, Levine, and Mishel 2020). The transition to motherhood hence remains a crucial point in women’s careers. Studies so far mostly focus directly on labor market outcomes such as wages and status; much less is known on how motherhood impacts the content of work, i.e. mothers’ job tasks. In this study we examine the impact of motherhood for women’s job tasks at work. Job tasks describe the frequency and intensity of occupational tasks that employees have to perform and a growing body of research shows their influence on inequality outcomes. For example, job tasks determine wages – across and within occupations (Liu and Grusky 2013) and are associated with advancement prospects (Gathmann and Schoenberg 2010).
In this study we ask the following research questions: How do job tasks of women change after childbirth? And, how do these changes depend on mother’s educational qualifications and occupational mobility upon return to the labor market?
By answering these questions, we seek to contribute to the research on motherhood penalties in the following ways. First, scrutinizing the motherhood penalty in job tasks shifts the focus to a thus far understudied outcome that is relevant in its own right. Second, mothers’ disadvantages in job tasks are an important mechanism for better understanding how penalties in wage and career chances and differentials therein between educational groups come about. Third, our focus on job tasks at the individual level can detect consequences of motherhood that previous studies focusing on occupational-level might have missed.
We use rich large-scale panel data of the adult cohort of the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). With rich information on socio-demographic characteristics and employment-related variables and a job-tasks module in a four-year interval (2011/12, 2015/16 and 2019/200, it is the only panel data set collecting detailed measures on job tasks. It is therefore particularly suited to examine the job task penalty for motherhood with fixed-effects panel models.

Duration:
Since 01 July 2020

Research Team:
(Head of project)
Prof. Dr. Wiebke Schulz (Head of project)
Bernhard Zangl (Head of project)

Project Type:
Personal project