in view of these changes it is useful to investigate whether the division of the labour market into formal and informal sectors gives rise to distinctive motherhood penalties this is done by examining formal and informalsector wages for mothers and nonmothers in argentina between and a period that spans the main liberalization policies set in motion in the early s pastor and wise our hypothesis is that the answers to all the above questions are affirmative because of the ways in which segmented labour markets differentially protect mothers working in the formal and informal sectors