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Motherhood penalty impacts a woman’s lifetime earnings, says study.

By on March 9, 2023

Despite the global movement toward gender pay equality, many women still face a motherhood penalty after having children, a study said Tuesday. The ‘motherhood penalty’ is a term coined by sociologists who argue working mothers face not only pay disadvantage, but perceived competence, and benefits compared to women who have no children to look after.

The Sankei Shimbun daily survey reveals that 65% of women in Japan said they put in less time for themselves than their day-to-day responsibilities compared to 42% of men.

It also revealed that women did 80% of the cooking, compared to 8% of men. The only household chore men did more than women was taking out the trash, at 49% to 43%.

In a report by consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) using the latest available 2021 data, little progress has been made in industrialized nations like Japan in the last ten years.

Japan which has long lagged behind other developed countries in terms of gender pay gap, ranked 116 out of 146 countries the World Economic Forum’s global report last year.

The average global pay gap between men and women, in terms of median hourly pay, stands at 14 percent and has only narrowed by 2.5 percentage points since 2011, according to PwC’s Women in Work Index.

PwC said it will take more than 50 years to narrow the gap adding that recent improvements were due to post-Covid recovery more than a real progress.

“It would take half a century to reach gender parity at this rate,” the group said, “adding recent improvements were driven by post-Covid recovery rather than genuine progress.”

The motherhood penalty, a loss in lifetime earnings experienced by women raising children — has become the most significant driver of the gender pay gap, PwC concluded in its report.

The underemployment and slower career progression women experience on returning to work after giving birth is prolonged by the unfair share of childcare they take on in almost every country around the world.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida vows to work even harder to tackle gender inequality in remarks he made to mark International Women’s Day this year.

WHICH COUNTRIES FARED BETTER?

Luxembourg topped PwC’s annual index, which rates the performance of OECD nations using key metrics for women’s employment outcomes.

The second best performer was New Zealand, followed by Slovenia.
If the rebound from Covid-19 has taught us anything, it is that we can’t rely on economic growth alone to produce gender equality — unless we want to wait another 50 years or more, said PwC economist Larice Stielow.

We must design and develop policy solutions that actively address the underlying causes of the inequality that exist today, she added.

Britain stood at 14th place, but was the top G7 nation ahead of Canada (18), Germany (21), France (23), the United States (25), Japan (28) and Italy (30).

 

 

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