Women with children tend to have lower salaries and less chance of promotion than do women without children.Credit: Ulf Svane/Washington Post/Getty
The financial losses that women sustain as a result of having children — as well as the extent to which government support can offset those losses — are highlighted by an analysis of data collected from more than 100,000 people.
According to a study published in November in the European Sociological Review, mothers in Denmark lost, on average, a cumulative US$120,000 in income in the two decades after the birth of their first child, compared with women who had not had children1. Government assistance, including paid maternity leave, child allowances and housing benefits, helped to bridge 80% of this gap.
“This research underlines the powerful role of the state in cushioning the financial shock of motherhood,” says Alice Martin, head of research at the Work Foundation at Lancaster University, UK. “But replacement income is not enough.”
Numerous studies have shown that, around the world, women are professionally and economically penalized if they have children. This is sometimes called the ‘motherhood penalty’. After having children, women experience a fall in income. Mothers receive lower starting salaries than men or women without children do, and are less likely to be promoted2. Moreover, in many countries, including the United States, not all parents receive paid time off to care for their children.
In the United Kingdom, a 2025 study drawing on census data found that mothers lost, on average, £65,618 (US$89,400) over the five years after the birth of their first child. In China, mothers’ wages decreased by 14% after they had their first child, and, if they had more children, this penalty grew with each child3.
Therese Bay-Smidt Christensen, then a doctoral candidate at the University of Copenhagen, and Alexandra Killewald, a sociologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, wanted to see whether Denmark’s relatively generous policies could offset the penalties that mothers face, and how long those penalties last for.
‘Huge income penalty’
The study drew on Danish registry data for women born between 1962 and 1965, and included their income and money transferred to them by the government. The cohort included more than 100,000 women who became mothers for the first time between 1982 and 2000, and almost 15,000 women who did not have children. The researchers matched mothers to women without children on the basis of their education levels, location and social history.
“We found a huge income penalty,” says Christensen, who is now a consultant at the DaneAge Association, a Danish non-profit organization based in Copenhagen that protects the rights of older people. The penalty was greater in the child’s early years and decreased over time. Nevertheless, the financial repercussions continued for two decades after the child’s birth. Over that period, Danish state support offset 80% of the mother’s lost income, the study found.
If the study were to be repeated with more-recent data, the gap between income and state transfers would be even smaller, she estimates, because Denmark has increased its parental leave provision and includes more non-transferable paternity leave.
Joya Misra, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, welcomes the research but laments that the state transfer data are not more granular. “I wish this study was able to help us understand the types of transfer income that they have identified,” she says. “I would be uncomfortable counting child allowances as mother’s income because they’re meant to support the cost of raising children, not actually compensating women for labour.”
Other scholars point out that the study tells only part of the story. “The more persistent challenge lies between mothers and fathers,” says Sigtona Halrynjo, a sociologist at the Institute for Social Research in Oslo. In a study published last year, she found that the gender gap tends to be largest in the private sector and in demanding, high-earning occupations in which bonuses and variable pay drive the inequality4. “For that reason, public income transfers alone are unlikely to close the gap.”
