The motherhood penalty: why your career stalled after kids, and his didn't

At five o'clock you leave work, and the whole way home you feel guilty toward your colleagues. At the table, you think about tomorrow's deadline, and feel guilty toward your child. There is no direction you can face where you feel like you are doing enough.

That is not because you are planning badly. It is because you are standing between two scripts that ask for the exact opposite of each other, and both of them act like they are the only standard that counts.

Legal scholar Joan Williams gave this bind a name years ago: the maternal wall bias. The assumption that a mother who scales back to care for her children is no longer committed to her work. And the assumption that a mother who keeps working exactly as before is not committed enough to her children.

Disengaged if you reduce your hours. Uninterested if you don't. There is no combination that satisfies both standards, because the standards were built to contradict each other.

This is the maternal wall bias. And it is the mechanism behind something with a name of its own: the motherhood penalty.

The motherhood penalty: what the numbers actually show

The motherhood penalty is the measurable, persistent loss in earnings and career progression that mothers experience after having children, a loss fathers do not experience to anything like the same degree.

Economist Henrik Kleven and colleagues (2019) established the core finding across several countries using an event-study method: before the birth of a first child, mothers' and fathers' earnings trajectories track closely together. After the birth, they split, sharply and permanently. The gap does not close as children get older. It does not depend on how ambitious or capable the mother was beforehand.

In the Netherlands specifically, CPB research (Rabaté & Rellstab, 2021/2022) found that mothers' income drops by 46% relative to their pre-birth earnings trajectory. Fathers' income does not change. The two researchers tested two competing explanations: childcare availability and gender norms. Childcare access turned out to barely move the number. The decisive factor was gender norms: the widely shared, rarely spoken assumption about who takes on caregiving after a birth, and who simply keeps working.

The OECD (2018) reported the same pattern from a different angle: Dutch men earn roughly 13% more than Dutch women, and most of that gap traces to women reducing their hours after becoming mothers while men do not. This is not the wage gap most people picture. It is not two people paid differently for the same work. It is one person's working life changing at the exact moment the other's does not.

Why this lands especially hard if you built your career before becoming a mother

There is a reason this hits particularly hard for women like you: highly educated, ambitious, used to being treated as an equal at work. Before you became a mother, your workplace probably felt gender-neutral. Same opportunities, same evaluation, same pace as anyone else.

Researcher Ann Crittenden names exactly this in The Price of Motherhood: many childless women under 35 believe the equality fight is already won. The moment a child arrives, that equal era ends. That is not because you did something wrong. It is because you are running into a bias reserved specifically for mothers, not for women in general. Your colleague without children does not experience it. You, with the exact same capabilities, do, the moment a child enters the picture.

Two scripts, designed to be irreconcilable

You likely already know the motherhood script: the unspoken rules about how a good mother is supposed to be. What working life adds is a second script, just as strict: the ideal worker norm. Always available. Always flexible. Career first, whatever is happening at home.

Both scripts were designed for a world that assumed you were either a mother or a professional. Never both at once. The good-mother script assumes someone available to her child around the clock. The ideal-worker script assumes someone with no caregiving responsibilities at all. Both scripts still exist. Both are still applied to you. At the same time.

That is not a coincidence of circumstances. That is a system that was never updated for a life in which you are both a mother and a professional.

Why the system keeps it this way

This is where it gets genuinely uncomfortable, because none of this happens by accident.

Sociologist Dr. Sophie Brock PhD describes eight implicit demands placed on a good mother inside what she calls patriarchal motherhood. Two of them go directly to this problem: that her motherhood must always take precedence over her paid work, and that she carries full responsibility for raising her children while getting almost no power or support to do it.

Why does that arrangement persist? For three reasons.

One: unpaid care saves society money. The International Labour Organization estimates the global value of unpaid care work at roughly 9% of global GDP, more than $11 trillion, based on 16.4 billion hours of unpaid care given every day. In some countries that share climbs past 40%. That is money society never has to spend, for as long as the care stays unpaid, and done by mostly moms.

Two: work treated as private and invisible gets no platform to change. If your combination of mother and professional is framed as your individual choice, then any dissatisfaction with it is automatically your individual problem too, not something to address collectively.

Three: researcher Andrea O'Reilly argues that the current, intensive ideal of motherhood did not emerge by coincidence in the same decades that women began working in large numbers, divorcing on their own terms, and rising professionally. Guilt and self-doubt keep your attention pointed inward, at your own shortcomings. Not outward, at the structure producing them.

None of this is a conspiracy theory. It is a structure that, exactly as it is built, ensures nobody has to change it.

It is not a scheduling problem, and it does not end when the kids grow up

The fix is not a more efficient calendar, and it is not trying harder on both fronts at once. You cannot out-plan two scripts that were deliberately designed to be incompatible.

And this is not a dip that resolves itself once the children are older. The income gap that opens now continues well past your last working day: women in the Netherlands retire with a pension roughly 40% lower than men's on average, one of the largest gender pension gaps in Europe. What feels right now like a temporary dip is, in reality, a line that still shows up decades later.

What actually helps is seeing that the guilt is not yours. It belongs to the system you are trying to be both a mother and a professional inside, a system where neither world has ever been updated for that combination.

So the question is not how to find a better balance between two irreconcilable ideals. The question is: who actually decided you had to choose between being a good mother and a good employee, and in which world was that ever true?

This is also why the motherhood penalty rarely stays a purely external, systems-quadrant problem. It tends to connect to two other places. To identity, because the ambition question ("am I still allowed to want this?") sits underneath the career decisions the penalty forces. And to your relationship, because inside most couples, whose career actually bends is decided at home, inside the partnership, not by the system directly. [The motherhood script]

What actually helps

Policy change is necessary here, and it is slow, and it is not yours to produce by yourself. Adequate parental leave for both parents, subsidised and flexible childcare, real protection against career penalties for caregiving: these are structural fixes, not individual ones.

While that change is pending, the part that is within reach is what happens inside your own household: whose career bends is currently being decided somewhere, by default, whether you have discussed it explicitly or not. Equal Parenting for Dual-Career Couples, built around the Family Model Canvas©, is the structured way two people make that decision on purpose instead of by accident, weighing both careers, both incomes, and both people's ambitions as real inputs rather than assuming one of you absorbs the cost quietly. [Equal Parenting for Dual-Career Couples ]

If the motherhood penalty is one of several places you feel stuck, that same work is folded into Mother on MY Terms, the program specifically designed for woman who want to acutally design the career and life that matters to them, working around the systems that aren't working.

Because even now, with the broken systems in place, you motherhood can look different. Modern motherhood can still feel good, just not if you keep on following 'the shoulds'. Check out Mother on MY Terms if you want to understand how you can do that.

About Babette Lockefeer

Babette Lockefeer is the founder of Matermorphosis and an expert at the intersection of leadership and matrescence. She previously worked as a leadership consultant at McKinsey. She is also part of The Mental Load collective, an international task force with the aim to make the systems fit the needs of parents. She writes about the structural realities of motherhood and work for Matermorphosis and for WIJ Ouders Magazine, and she supports ambitious moms thourgh the unique maze of Matrescence. Because she believes: The real invitation of matrescence is to become a thriving mom.

Matermorphosis · matermorphosis.com

Frequently asked questions about the motherhood penalty

What is the motherhood penalty? The motherhood penalty is the measurable, persistent drop in earnings and career progression that mothers experience after having children, while fathers' earnings and career trajectories are largely unaffected. Economist Henrik Kleven and colleagues (2019) documented the pattern across several countries: incomes track closely before a first birth, then split sharply and permanently afterward. In the Netherlands, CPB research (Rabaté & Rellstab, 2021/2022) found the drop measures 46% relative to a mother's pre-birth earnings trajectory.

What is the maternal wall bias, and how is it different from the motherhood penalty? The maternal wall bias, a term coined by legal scholar Joan Williams, is the mechanism: the assumption that a mother who reduces her hours is less committed to her work, and the assumption that a mother who does not reduce her hours is less committed to her children. There is no way to satisfy both assumptions at once. The motherhood penalty is the measurable economic outcome of that bias operating at scale, in earnings, promotions, and career trajectories.

Is the motherhood penalty about mothers choosing to work less, or something else? Research points away from individual choice as the main driver. CPB researchers Rabaté and Rellstab tested childcare availability against gender norms as competing explanations for the Dutch earnings gap and found childcare access barely moved the number. The decisive factor was the largely unspoken assumption about who takes on caregiving after a birth. The OECD's 2018 findings on the Dutch gender pay gap point the same way: most of the gap traces to reduced hours after motherhood specifically, not to unequal pay for the same work.

Does the motherhood penalty affect fathers too? Not in the same way. Kleven et al.'s (2019) cross-country data and the Dutch CPB findings both show fathers' income and career trajectories continuing largely unchanged after a first birth. This asymmetry is precisely what makes the penalty a motherhood penalty rather than a general parenthood effect: the same event (having a child) produces a measurable cost for one parent and not the other.

How long does the motherhood penalty last? Longer than the years of active caregiving. The earnings gap it opens does not close as children grow older, and it compounds into retirement: women in the Netherlands retire with a pension roughly 40% lower than men's on average, one of the largest gender pension gaps in Europe. The motherhood penalty is not a temporary dip absorbed during the early years of parenting. It is a lifetime effect that begins at the birth of a first child.