“Our guess or our theory is that it has something to do with the nature of arts careers, that they're more flexible in terms of employment, that they're more project-based,” says Lindemann, an assistant professor of sociology at Lehigh University. “Some arts careers are done in an office 9-to-5, but more often you can work from home and it's not the typical [situation where] you have to be in the office for this certain amount of time. It's more of a project-based labor market.”

Lindemann hypothesizes that another part of the equation might be that artists are more likely to challenge gendered traditions. As a result, chores and childcare—unpaid work that traditionally falls on females—might be more evenly divided in artists’ households. “It’s possible that artists may be more liberal than the general population, or … that artists maybe have more egalitarian ideas about child-rearing, so they're sharing more equally in that sphere,” says Lindemann.

But Lindemann says that artistic careers aren’t exactly a utopia for women: The pay gap exists, and fathers still receive a bonus, meaning their wages go up relative to men without kids. So even though women working in the arts aren't experiencing the motherhood penalty (wages going down relative to women without kids), they are still penalized because they're not getting the premium that many fathers are seeing.

Other research has specifically studied which mothers pay a motherhood penalty and why. The research of Melissa Binder, an associate professor of economics at the University of New Mexico, along with her co-authors Deborah Anderson and Kate Krause, has found that highly educated women pay a high price to become mothers, as briefly “stopping out” of the labor force leads employers to believe that their skills and knowledge are outdated. But for women with high-school degrees, Binder and her co-authors found that middle-skill mothers suffered more prolonged and severe wage losses, likely because they are employed in jobs that don’t allow for flexibility.

Binder sees some overlaps between her findings and those of Lindemann and her colleagues. “Highly educated women can work after-hours to make up for taking a kid to the doctor. Women who work in low-skill jobs can find shift work that allows them to pick their kids up after school,” she explains. “A mom-artist presumably does not need to ‘stop out,’ and her work can be done at any hour. So it makes sense, from our findings, that she won't be penalized, relative to a woman who has no kids.”

Lindemann’s study lends credence to the idea that a flexible work schedule can alleviate the wage penalties working mothers often see in the workplace. Claudia Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard who has done some of the most influential research on the gender gap, has found smaller pay gaps in the technology, science, and health sectors—fields that tend to offer more flexibility. Conversely, she found bigger gaps in fields with more rigid schedules, such as those in corporate, financial, and legal professions.

As flexible schedules become more common for some white-collar workers, it’s worth studying careers without motherhood penalties to see what else it could be about these jobs that make them more equal. The results could have interesting implications on the continuing restructuring of work, and the efforts to change traditions in the interest of wage equality.

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