How does that map into the overall level of gender inequality that I have in society today? And when you do that very simple decomposition exercise, you suddenly realize that, yes, this very large effect of having kids on women relative to men is today explaining most of the remaining gender inequality. The impact that kids have on women relative to men has stayed relatively constant over the past 30 to 40 years. We've seen anti-discrimination laws in the labor market. We've seen an incredible rise in female education so that women are more educated than men on average today. So we've made a massive effort in terms of reducing gender inequality through all of these dimensions that are not kid related, but the impact of kids remains the same. If it's the case, then that means that essentially we might have reached a plateau in terms of level of gender convergence. What we need to understand next is whether this specialization in the household is something that is beneficial for everyone, or to the contrary, it is something that is also affecting women in their well-being.
Child penalty
Professor of Economics
A surprising finding of our research has been just how important the arrival of kids is to understand gender inequality today. While it seems like a truism that having kids changes household dynamics, we were missing a measurement of how this event affects men relative to women. The impact on women is brutal and persistent, explaining most of the remaining gender inequality in society today.
- The arrival of children causes a brutal and persistent earnings decrease of roughly 30% to 35% for women in the UK, while men’s earnings remain largely unaffected.
- This "child penalty" explains most of the remaining gender inequality in society today, persisting despite gains in female education and anti-discrimination laws.
- The penalty is driven by social norms regarding gender roles; women's "active time" devoted to work and domestic chores increases by 25% while men's lives remain virtually unchanged.
- There is a direct link between the child penalty and mental health; antidepressant prescriptions for mothers increase by more than 100% after childbirth.
- Evidence shows that the penalty remains the same even when the woman is the primary breadwinner, proving that economic incentives are not the root cause.
- Countries with larger child penalties see significantly lower fertility rates, suggesting that gender equality is essential to resolving the global fertility crisis.
Child penalty and gender inequality
So really a surprising finding of our research has been just how important what happens at the moment of the arrival of kids is to understand gender inequality today. That might really seem like a truism, particularly for a lot of people who have kids. Yes, it is a really important moment in our lives. And that changes quite a lot of the dynamics in terms of our behaviors and in particular, what happens within the household. But surprisingly, I'd say there was a piece of the puzzle that was missing, which was just to try to measure in the simplest way possible, just how the event of having kids was affecting the outcomes of men relative to women. When you do that, you realize that the impact of the arrival of children on women is large. It is brutal, it is severe and it is persistent. To give you an idea, in the UK today, women are going to experience a decrease in their earnings relative to what would have happened if they did not have kids of roughly 30 to 35% in the ten years following the birth of the kid. Whereas for men, not much is happening.
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Drastic change in women's lives
What our research shows there is really intriguing. It shows that basically the life of women changes absolutely drastically when kids arrive. They need to rearrange the entirety of their diaries. They need to spend a lot more time being active. By active time, I mean the time they devote to work, the time they devote to domestic chores and domestic work, the time they devote to childcare. All of this increases by roughly 20 to 25% the moment kids arrive. This is massive. It means that you need to decrease the time that you spend in leisure, the time that you spend in personal care, the time that you spend going out with friends, the time that you spend sleeping, eating.
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So when we look at the specialization through the lens of all the myriad of tasks that men and women are doing, we see that that specialization is creating a total rearrangement of the lives of women whereas for men, almost nothing happens. It has a cost because a lot of the activities that they have to take on are physically demanding and cognitively demanding. You see that the physicality, the cognitive load of the daily life of a mother, increases drastically, and even more so compared to men. You can then essentially trace out the final step, which is to look at mental health outcomes to get a more direct version of what people have called the mental load. Is it real the mental load? Do we really see a penalty in terms of stress or mental health? Yes we do. Research now shows very precisely that after the arrival of kids, for instance, the prescription of antidepressants increases drastically by more than 100%.
Drivers of child penalties
What can we do? Before talking about public policies, we need to first understand what are the drivers of this child penalty? For quite some time, a traditional explanation has been underlieing economic incentives and comparative advantages. Women might earn a little bit less or have a little bit less of a promising career than their partners and therefore, that explains why even a small difference in relative earnings can translate into large specialization in home production. Problem with that explanation is that it just doesn't hold in the data. When you look at couples where the female is actually the highest earner or has the highest flying career, you see that she pays the exact same child penalty in the labor market than couples in which it's the opposite situation. Economic incentives are not the things that bind.
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Is it biology? Is it that women have something deep inside them that tells them that they should take care of kids and men should not? Again, on the face of it, it looks plausible, but it doesn't stand the test of data. Most of the penalty is due to the rise in tasks such as cleaning, preparing food, taking the kids to school, a bunch of tasks where honestly, I do not see what would be the biological foundation that would make women inherently better than men. Then we're left with what? Well, we're left with the fact that maybe we're not the slaves of our biology, but we might be the slaves of the idea that we have of our biology, the ideas that we have of the role that we should have in societies.
Gender roles and norms
And what's very clear is that indeed, what's really important in explaining the penalty is what people believe should be their role, their gender role in the household. And on this, we've seen quite a lot of evolution recently. We've seen that women are much less constrained by a stereotype by which they should stay at home and just be moms. For them, the past 20, 30 years have brought a world in which they are free to invest in a career or staying at home. Therefore, there is quite a lot of freedom in terms of the norms that relate to what they should be doing. What hasn't changed though, and that's something really important that recent research shows, is that for men, not much has happened. For men the norm that they could spend a lot and invest time in their kids is not the one in place.
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What you fundamentally need to change is the concrete allocation of tasks. You need to make men take some time with the kids, take part of the burden of the additional domestic chores that arise. How do you do that? Well, it turns out that we have policies that do precisely that, that change, at least early on, the allocation of time that men and women spend at home versus the labor market. What are these policies? It's parental leaves.
Parental leave
What do parental leave policies do? They do precisely this: they control the allocation that people spend at home versus the labor market early on. What we should be doing is have a system of parental leave policies that readjusts, that recalibrates the time that men and women spend at home, at least early on. Research shows that actually this is incredibly effective. Even small increases in the allocation of parental leave towards men spending more time at home early on have long lasting effects on gender inequality within the household and also on the beliefs that people hold about what they should be doing.
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One thing, though, that needs to be mentioned is that when you do these type of policies, you're essentially changing an allocation. You're forcing men to take a bit more time and reducing the time that women can spend early on with their kids. That's really the nature of the policy variation that we studied in Denmark. And when you do that, at first, people are not happy because they feel like you're intruding in their freedom to reallocate things. So there is definitely some notion of trade off that you need to take carefully between the impact that you can have in reducing gender inequality and the level of satisfaction that people may have thinking, oh, this is intruding on my sovereignty to make my own choices.
Fertility decline
There are so many reasons why addressing the child penalty is central for policymakers. One, of course, is equity, fairness; it is not possible to imagine a world in which my son and my daughters would not have the same opportunities. But if we do nothing, today we've essentially reached a plateau in terms of gender convergence. There is an important aspect of the child penalty that a lot of people should bear in mind as well, is the impact it has on the decline in fertility. We've talked a lot about the fertility decline and the crisis it is imposing in the long run on developed nations and middle income countries alike.
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When you correlate how large is the child penalty in a country and how low its total fertility rate is, you get a strong, strong negative correlation. As women become more educated, they live in a world that has grown more equal in which they are less discriminated, of course, they want to have a career. They don't want to sacrifice having a career on the fact of having a family, they would want to be able to do both. Right now, the level of child penalties prevent them from doing so. Therefore, they are just refusing to enter that contract. If you really want to resolve the fertility crisis, you need to make the world more equal in terms of gender. That's the story that Scandinavian countries have been teaching us. Fertility has remained relatively strong because they're also at the forefront of gender equality.
Editor’s note: This article has been faithfully transcribed from the original interview filmed with the author, and carefully edited and proofread. Edit date: 2026
Discover more about
Child penalty
Kleven, H., Landais, C. and Leite-Mariante, G. The Child Penalty Atlas. The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 92, Issue 5, October 2025, pp. 3174-3207.
The Child Penalty Atlas. Website.
Landais, C., Leite-Mariante, G. and Manfredi, S. (2025), Explaining Variation in Child Penalties: The Role of Gender Norms and Policies. LSE Public Policy Review.
Kleven, H., Landais, C,. Posch, J., Steinhauer, A. and Zweimuller, J. (2019), Child Penalties Across Countries: Evidence and Explanations. AEA Papers & Proceedings, 109: 122-126.
