It’s called the baby penalty: Working women with children tend to earn less than similar women who don’t have children. For some groups, however, having a baby is actually a bonus, with some moms earning more than their counterparts.


The Washington Post’s calculator is based on Census data and the work of Columbia University researchers Jane Waldfogel and Ipshita Pal. Select the demographic characteristics to compare salary differences between working mothers and women without children.

Having children is believed to be one of the reasons why women earn 79 cents for every dollar a man earns: Even when women continue working after having children, they tend to do the majority of child-rearing and that’s influenced wages (e.g., women put their careers on pause to take care of young kids and then are behind when they reenter the workforce).


There’s good news here, though, at least for some moms. Some groups—particularly white women and married women, and women with college degrees—seem to be earning more than similar working women without children. The biggest contributing factor, the Washington Post suggests, is the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), introduced in 1993. It gives new parents (at companies with more than 50 workers) three months of unpaid leave and a guarantee there’ll still be a job waiting for them. Fathers get some time off too, which helps married women continue their work and perhaps avoid the baby penalty. (Also, the article doesn’t note this, but more men are becoming stay at home dads, which undoubtedly help the moms with their careers.) Unmarried women might not have that support, and, thus, the baby penalty.

The US still has a long way to go when it comes to family-friendly labor laws. This calculator is a reminder of that and also some encouragement that things are also getting better for some.

Our simple calculator lets you figure out how much having a child affects your salary | The Washington Post