Explaining why some young mothers become neet, and why some of them eventually take up employment or education again.

In recent decades, women’s labor market participation in the Netherlands and other Western European countries has dramatically increased. However, earnings of men and women still show substantial gaps around childbirth (Budig & England, 2001; Kleven, Landais, Posch, Steinhauer, & Zweimüller, 2019). t an early age, childbirth might be even more crucial to the emergence of inequalities (Chevalier & Viitanen, 2003; Gibb, Fergusson, Horwood, & Boden, 2015). To understand this process, we study young women’s education and employment trajectories around first childbirths. We observe monthly activities up to two years before and five years after. In line with previous research (Vlasblom & Schippers, 2006), we find substantial path dependence of pre to post birth trajectories. In a next step, we aim to explain this path dependence by means of human capital and social capital theories.

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