Do College-Educated Women Reduce Their Motherhood Wage Penalty by Delaying Childbearing?

Catalina Amuedo Dorantes, San Diego State University
Jean Kimmel, Western Michigan University

One of the stylized facts from the past thirty years has been the declining rate of first births before age 30 for all women and the increase rate of first births after age 30 among women with four-year college degrees (Martin 2000). What are some of the factors behind women’s decision to postpone their childbearing? We hypothesize that the wage gap often observed between like-educated mothers and non-mothers (Waldfogel 1998) may be mitigated by postponing fertility. We use individual-level data on women from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to estimate a wage equation model that is later on expanded to address fundamental econometric issues and the education/fertility issue at hand. We find that half of the motherhood wage gap of college-educated women can be eliminated by postponing fertility until their thirties, helping us understand the postponement of maternity among educated women and the overall decline in fertility.