Motherhood and Income : A study on how motherhood affects women’s income

Sammanfattning: This paper explores the income effect which motherhood has on women, using (American) Census data. The hypothesis states that the income effect is negative. Previous studies have shown that indeed children lower the income of women and that it is decreased with every additional child. We test our hypothesis using data from the Census Bureau from the year 2018, consisting of over 800 000 answers, and running multiple regressions to measure the effect which the number of children have on a woman’s income. As predicted, the results indicate that our hypothesis is true with a 26% decline in income when a woman has one or more children. Marriage has a negative effect on income while completing higher levels of education raises it.