Parenthood and the academic Ladder in Science
Abstract: Women continue to be underrepresented among senior scientists and professors, especially among permanent faculty in academia. Using Danish population administrative data and publication data, we study the impact of children on the career trajectories of researchers in academia. While men and women follow similar career trends before having a child, after becoming parents, their career paths in academia diverge. We find that mothers are 15 percentage points less likely than fathers to remain employed as faculty at universities. The motherhood penalty is particularly stark when we examine the likelihood of tenured employment after childbirth - while men's employment in tenured positions is unaffected by the arrival of a child, women, on average, experience a 20 percentage points drop in their rate of tenured employment, and even greater at 30 percentage points when considering only full time positions. This drop persists even 8 years after birth. We observe that the first childbirth is also followed by a drop in research output as measured by annual publications relative to productivity before birth. This can explain 1/3, but not all, of the penalty on tenured employment. We investigate how differences in the field of research, stage of career at first birth, and couple gender norms affect these penalties. (co-authored with Sofie Cairo, Anne Sophie Lassen and Valentina Tartari)