While being a parent can fill you with love and joy, it can also come at a cost, especially for women.
Women Seeking Employment
According to the International Labour Force (ILO), 52% of women aged 25-54 are participating in the global labour force (i.e, they are employed or actively seeking employment), compared to 95% of men.
They predict that over the period running to 2025, both male and female labour force participation rates will decline, but that this will be more pronounced among women than men.
The ILO also found that in 2023, the jobs gap rate for women was 13.7%, compared to 9.3%.
This highlights how women can face more difficulties finding employment, and one of the driving factors is motherhood.
Unequal Childcare Responsibilities
Childcare responsibilities often fall on women, meaning that many women end up taking career breaks to perform unpaid labour in the form of childcare and domestic work.
In fact, in their Gender Pensions Gap Report 2024, Now: Pensions found that women were 60% more likely to carry out unpaid work and take on primary care roles than men, taking them an average of 26 hours a week, compared to 16 hours for men.
Given that childcare usually disproportionately falls on women, its requirements tend to have a far larger impact on their working lives than it does for men.
In 2023, the Fawcett Society and Totaljobs found that:
- 1/10 working mothers quit jobs due to childcare provisions
- 2/5 working mothers have turned down promotions due to childcare pressures
“The few years that a mother spends looking after children is a tiny proportion of her working life.
Too often, outdated prejudices and assumptions mean that women face unnecessary and harmful attitudes that hold them back. This results in many women stuck in roles that are below their capabilities.” -Jemima Olchaweski, Chief Executive of the Fawcett Society
The Motherhood Penalty
Although some women choose to return to work after maternity leave, others choose not to rejoin the labour force. This pattern is seen in the UK, as shown by the above graph, where we can see this steep drop for wthe amount of women in work just after motherhood, followed by an upward tick where some choose to rejoin, but which still sees women’s participation in work never quite reaching the same as men’s after having children.
The impact that parenthood has on women’s careers is often referred to as the ‘motherhood penalty.’ Women often pay a wage penalty for having children, where they:
- Cut short their education
- Leave the labour force for extended periods
- Move to part-time employment
- Move to lesser-paid careers which better suit childcare requirements and pass up promotions due to time or locational constraints