"Motherhood penalty": The impact of age at first birth on women's wages

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between the age of first birth and the value of the "motherhood penalty" in wages. The author constructs a fixed-effects panel regression using panel data from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (waves from 2006 to 2022). The study finds that having a child leads to a 12.7 per cent decrease in wages. Furthermore, the author observes that the largest difference occurs among women who had their first child between the ages of 25 and 30 is 17 per cent, while among those who became mothers before the age of 25, it is 7 per cent, and among those who did so after the age of 30, it is 11.7 per cent.