Women strategically sort into “family-friendly” sectors characterized by lower returns to experience but lower per-child penalties before the birth of their first child. This anticipatory sorting represents an ex-ante cost of motherhood that is entirely missed by conventional child penalty measures.
By providing empirical evidence for both margins, the authors show that women are not passive subjects of child penalties; they are active, strategic agents who utilize these finer trade-offs to realize family goals while mitigating career costs.
IAB-Discussion Paper 02/2026: Navigating Motherhood: Endogenous Penalties and Career Choice
Image: Adobe Stock / Ingo Bartussek