CREAT: Census Research Exploration and Analysis Tool

Female Executives and the Motherhood Penalty

January 2021

Working Paper Number:

CES-21-03

Abstract

Childbirth and subsequent breaks from the labor market are a primary reason why the average earnings of women is lower than that of men. This paper uses linked survey and administrative data from the United States to investigate whether the sex composition of executives at the firm, defined as the top earners, affects the earnings and employment outcomes of new mothers. We begin by documenting that (i) the male-female earnings gap is smaller in industries in which a larger share of executives are women, and (ii) the male-female earnings gap has declined more in industries that have experienced larger increases in the share of executives who are female. Despite these cross-sectional and longitudinal correlations, we find no evidence that the sex composition of the executives at the firm has a causal effect on the childbirth and motherhood penalties that impact women's earnings and employment.

Document Tags and Keywords

Keywords Keywords are automatically generated using KeyBERT, a powerful and innovative keyword extraction tool that utilizes BERT embeddings to ensure high-quality and contextually relevant keywords.

By analyzing the content of working papers, KeyBERT identifies terms and phrases that capture the essence of the text, highlighting the most significant topics and trends. This approach not only enhances searchability but provides connections that go beyond potentially domain-specific author-defined keywords.
:
earnings, executive, employee, employ, employed, labor, heterogeneity, woman, salary, earn, earner, women earnings, mother

Tags Tags are automatically generated using a pretrained language model from spaCy, which excels at several tasks, including entity tagging.

The model is able to label words and phrases by part-of-speech, including "organizations." By filtering for frequent words and phrases labeled as "organizations", papers are identified to contain references to specific institutions, datasets, and other organizations.
:
Decennial Census, Employer Identification Numbers, American Community Survey, Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics, Protected Identification Key, 2010 Census, Federal Reserve Board of Governors

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