The Motherhood Wage Penalty: A Varieties of Capitalism Approach

Sammanfattning: This paper aims to relate the issue of the Motherhood Wage Penalty to the institutional framework "Varieties of Capitalism." Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study, we perform cross-national analyses on the discrepancy in wages between mothers with young children and females without children. The second step of the analysis entails four different measures with relevance to both the institutional framework and our applied gender focus. We find that when nations exhibit features in line with "coordinated market economies," characterized by relatively stubborn employment protection, smaller degree of general inequality, more concentrated wage bargaining, and higher rate of unionization, mothers are relatively more penalized in monetary terms compared to "liberal market economies." The results add valuable insight to the limited gender literature within the framework and propose follow-up questions for expanding the efforts of gendering the Varieties of Capitalism.