Parenthood and job quality: is there a motherhood penalty in the UK?

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

November 15, 2023

Summary:

Current research recognises the role of parenthood in contributing to gender inequalities at work. Meanwhile, there is a growing interest in job quality. We contribute to both these debates by analysing differences in job quality by gender and parenthood status, using data from a nationally representative UK household survey. We develop a 12-indicator, multi-dimensional measure of job quality and use this to analyse the combination and distribution of job quality attributes by gender and parenthood status. Our analysis shows that women and mothers are under-represented in high quality jobs and over-represented in poor quality jobs. While some mothers sacrifice career prospects for flexibility, motherhood is not always associated with more flexibility, and job quality disadvantages are multi-faceted. Working part time is a strong driver of job quality differences, suggesting that reduced hours after motherhood impacts on job quality in addition to worsening women’s pay. Job quality gaps are larger for mothers of school-aged children, pointing to the additional constraints of managing work and childcare around the school day.

Published in

Social Indicators Research

Volume and page numbers

Volume: 170 , p.765 -793

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-023-03214-6

ISSN

3038300

Subjects

Notes

Open Access

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.


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