Young Women's Job Mobility: The Influence of Motherhood Status and Education

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)Women pay a price for bearing and raising children; studies consistently have found that mothers earn lower wages than childless women (Budig & England, 2001; Glauber, 2007; Wald- fogel, 1997). Even after controlling for a number of potential differences between mothers and childless women that might influence wages, including human capital, work experience, work hours, and unobserved differences, scholars have found that mothers receive a per-child penalty of approximately 5%. The motherhood wage penalty, as this phenomenon has come to be known, is greater for women who bear chil- dren in their 20s, compared to those who delay childbearing until their 30s (Amuedo-Dorantes & Kimmel, 2005; Miller, 2011; Taniguchi, 1999). Previous explanations for early child bearers' greater disadvantage have focused on the importance of the accumulation of work experience prior to the birth of a child. For example, Taniguchi (1999) found that work experience acquired before becoming a mother contributes more to women's wage gains than work experience following childbirth. Relatedly, Miller (2011) found a flattening of women's wage profiles following motherhood, which she suggested supports the "mommy track," or reduced opportunities for training and promo- tion following motherhood, as an explanation for higher wage penalties among early child bearers.It is likely that motherhood affects not only the opportunities afforded to women within the workplace but also their movement among work- places. Interfirm mobility, often referred to as job mobility, is one of the key ways by which young workers increase or decrease their wages (AlonTBernhardt,Morris,Hand- cock, & Scott, 2001; Fuller, 2008; Keith & McWilliams, 1997; Topel & Ward, 1992). Dif- ferences in both mobility patterns (including rates and types of mobility) and wage returns to job mobility have been found to contribute to wage disparities between men and women as well as among workers of different racial/ethnic groups (Alon & Tienda, 2005; Fuller, 2008; Keith & McWilliams, 1997; Oettinger, 1996). It follows, then, that if children influence the fre- quency with which young women change jobs, the reason that they change jobs, or if women's status as mothers affects the wage outcomes of job mobility, these differences might con- tribute to the motherhood wage penalty and help explain why this penalty is largest for young mothers.To date, only one other published study has examined differences in wage returns to job mobility by motherhood status. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79), Fuller (2008) found that childless women reap larger benefits for voluntary job separations compared to mothers, suggesting that unequal wage returns to job mobility may play an important role in creating the moth- erhood wage penalty. Yet aggregate trends often mask important variation among workers. The size of the motherhood penalty and the mechanisms contributing to it vary by women's education and across the income distribution (Amuedo-Dorantes & Kimmel, 2005; Ander- son, Binder, & Krause, 2003; Budig & Hodges, 2010; Taniguchi, 1999). Moreover, the benefits of job mobility depend in large part on one's education (Alon & Tienda, 2005). Education largely determines the opportunity structures afforded women in the labor market, as well as the resources available to them in their efforts to combine childrearing and paid employment; thus, wage returns to job mobility may be very different among mothers with and without a college education.In this research, I used panel data from the 1979-2010 waves of the NLSY79 (http://www. bls.gov/nls/nlsy79.htm) and fixed-effects regres- sion models to examine how differences in the patterns of and wage returns to job mobility by motherhood status are mediated by education. I extend neoclassical economic theories of job matching to examine the role of motherhood and education in young women's decisions to change jobs and the benefits they derive from these changes. …