The Motherhood penalty

Sammanfattning: The aim of this thesis is to unveil what constitutes the Motherhood Wage Penalty, a phenomenon that according to recent research makes up a majority of the gender wage gap we observe on the labor market. More specifically, the ambition is to try to explain how motherhood affects working women and if it is possible to rule out other possible explanations for the gender pay gap, such as education and hours worked, other than motherhood itself - which would indicate that there are elements of the gender wage gap that are structural and discriminatory. The research is carried out through regression analysis with data from the United States in 2016.