Still Penalized? Parity, Age at First Birth and Women's Income in Later Life

Abstract

Despite policies aimed at decreasing old-age income inequality, such as Social Security and Supplemental Security Income, research consistently finds that later-life poverty is highly concentrated among women. While the early-life economic disadvantages of motherhood are well established, little work has examined whether these disadvantages persist into later life. Life course research consistently demonstrates the relationship between early-life choices and later-life inequality, but few studies have examined whether the reproductive phase of a woman's life is associated with her later-life income. Using data from the 2003 wave of the National Longitudinal Survey of Mature Women cohort, this research examines whether women's age at first birth and parity are associated with her later-life income within the context of marriage. From a set of multivariate analyses, I find that despite a marginal statistically significant effect, substantively for the women in this cohort the effects of childbearing are not particularly consequential for later-life income. The results suggest that as women age the economic penalties associated with motherhood are less important to financial well-being than are other factors.

Keywords:

• motherhood
• aging
• income

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Jill Quadagno, Kathryn Harker Tillman, and Isaac Eberstein for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

1. I used the following formula to adjust for household size: Where e is the equivalence elasticity, which can be set from 0–1. In this analysis I set e to 0.55, which is the average summary elasticity measure for scales such as those used to determine benefits for U.S. social programs (Willson, 2003)

2. Based on a ladder test in STATA/SE 11, this transformation is the best choice for correcting the skew.