The Price of Parenthood

Much has been written about the gender inequality of childcare in the United States, particularly after the pandemic-related childcare closures that disproportionately affected women. But as a recent American Sociological Review paper co-authored by sociologist Pilar Gonalons-Pons makes clear, the high cost of paid childcare also creates direct inequities in family income.

Gonalons-Pons, Alber-Klingelhofer Presidential Associate Professor of Sociology, published the research with Ioana Marinescu, an associate professor in Penn’s School of Social Policy & Practice. Gonalons-Pons says the idea behind the study had been brewing for a while. “I really wanted to flesh out how the way we socially distribute care—the way we allocate it and value it—has big implications for all sorts of outcomes, including, in this case, family income inequality.”

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The premise of the conclusion the researchers drew is straightforward: As childcare becomes more expensive, in the absence of a comprehensive system of government-provided services and subsidies, women with lower earnings potential are discouraged from pursuing paid work after they give birth. Instead, they take on the unpaid work of staying home to look after the young child—leading to substantial income losses for their families.

For their primary data source, Gonalons-Pons and Marinescu used the Survey of Income and Program Participation, a national survey of some 50,000 families that tracks information about household and family composition, employment, and income. Their sample included people who identify as women ages 15 to 45 and mainly focused on first and second births to women partnered with men (though they also looked at a larger sample of women that included unpartnered participants and participants partnered with other women).

Analyzing the relationship between birth events and family income, the researchers discovered that for women without college degrees, a $1,000 increase in the annual price of childcare was associated with a half-hour decline in weekly work and an 8 percent decline in monthly earnings. By contrast, higher childcare costs had no effect on work hours or earnings for women with college degrees, nor did it affect these factors for their male partners.

“We focused on women with partners,” says Gonalons-Pons, “because we wanted to capture all the possibilities of how these births could impact family income. If the births reduced earnings for the woman but increased earnings for the man, for instance, then there would be no impact on family income. We wanted to capture all the income flows for the family.”  Sample sizes for other family types—unpartnered women or women partnered with women—were too small for sub-analyses, but Gonalons-Pons says they were able to include all women and births in the broader analyses, leaving their main findings unchanged.

How much would inequality among women, by class or by race, change if we got rid of these penalties?

Understanding how the structure of care in the U.S. influences family income, says Gonalons-Pons, can help elucidate why income inequality in this country is greater today than in the past, and why the family income gap is larger than in other countries.

“In Sweden, for example, which has robust social programs around childcare, family income inequality is significantly less than it is in the U.S.,” she notes. “That is typically explained by talking about the minimum wage, which is higher in Sweden than here, or unionization, which is more prevalent in Sweden than in the U.S., but that’s not the full picture. The way we organize caregiving responsibilities also plays a large role.”

Gonalons-Pons says that for next steps, she is interested in using cross-national comparative data to see how much Sweden’s childcare policies account for its lower family income inequality. She is also currently working on a paper that explores economic penalties associated with different kinds of caregiving, including providing care to adults.

All kinds of caregiving—both paid and unpaid—lead to economic penalties in the U.S., she says, adding, “How much would inequality among women, by class or by race, change if we got rid of these penalties?” This work can be seen as a first step toward answering such critical questions.