Women, Work, and Motherhood: Changing Employment Penalties for Motherhood in West Germany after 1945 -- A Comparative Analysis of Cohorts Born in 1934-1971

This paper deals with the effects of entry into motherhood on
women's employment dynamics. Our analysis is based on the complete
lifetime working- and income histories of a 1% sample of all
persons born between 1934 and 1971 and employed in West Germany
sometime between 1975 and 1995. We use the records of women who
were employed before the birth of their first child. We apply a
semi-parametric hierarchical Bayesian modeling approach
simultaneously including several time scales and further covariates
whose effects we estimate by MCMC techniques. We investigate
short-term consequences of entry into motherhood and their changes
over different birth cohorts and thereby take into account the
employment histories before the birth of the first child. We
conduct two models differentiating between the simple return to the
labor market and the return for at least a certain period in order
to measure subsequent employment stability. Our results indicate
that a higher extent of employment experience, a stronger
attachment to the labor market and an employment in white collar
jobs reduces the employment penalty for mothers after the birth of
their first child.