Growing evidence suggests that the gender pay gap emerges abruptly at motherhood as women work less for pay to manage the increased caregiving responsibilities at home. US tax data show that the so-called child penalty for women’s annual wage earnings grows sharply after their first child is born. Academics and policymakers have cited the absence of paid family leave in the United States as a major obstacle to gender equity in the labor market—they argue that these policies would enable US workers to take longer leaves to care for newborns rather than dropping out of the labor force. Workers remaining attached to employers could help them retain skills, minimizing wage losses due to caregiving. More women leave the labor force than men for caregiving reasons, so formalizing paid leave policies could narrow the gender pay gap. Additionally, research has found that longer leaves benefit the health and well-being of infants and parents. As of 2021, paid leave policies for childbearing had been enacted in 10 states and for most federal workers, and similar legislation has been proposed by another 16 states and the federal government.

Our research shows that a modest paid leave program of six additional weeks—with equal access for mothers and fathers—may have the unintended effect of increasing labor market inequities between women and men. Greater take-up of paid leave among women (relative to men) tends to reinforce long-standing gender norms and childcare patterns, which have limited women’s labor market advancement.

Our research uses large-scale tax data from the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration to evaluate the cumulative effects of California Senate Bill 1661, which introduced a paid family leave insurance program, on women’s careers and childbearing up to 12 years after they give birth. Beginning on July 1, 2004, the paid family leave program offered parents an additional six weeks of partially paid leave to bond with a newborn. This new bonding leave supplements the six weeks of partially paid disability leave already provided by California’s short-term disability insurance program.

Our research design relies on differences in women’s ability to take consecutive weeks of paid parental leave after the paid family leave program’s implementation. Six weeks of paid family leave under the program became available for women giving birth as early as August 2003, but only eligible women giving birth after May 20, 2004, could take those weeks immediately after six weeks of short-term disability leave. Our analysis finds that women who could take consecutive short-term disability leave and paid family leave were 16 percentage points more likely to take paid family leave than women giving birth earlier. This difference allows us to compare women who gave birth after May 20, 2004, with women who gave birth earlier and thus were less likely to take paid family leave.

Our findings challenge the conventional wisdom that paid leave improves women’s career outcomes. Averaging among all mothers, our findings provide no evidence that the additional paid leave impacted career outcomes. However, among women giving birth for the first time after paid family leave benefits became available, employment fell by 6 percent, and annual earnings decreased by 13 percent relative to women who gave birth before the benefits program began. Moreover, these negative earnings effects persisted for over a decade: Wage earnings remained 13 percent lower 9–12 years later. These estimates imply a loss in lifetime earnings of $83,000 (discounted to the present day). However, our research finds no evidence of negative employment or earnings effects for women who had an additional child after the paid family leave insurance program’s implementation. Furthermore, our findings reveal that women with the lowest pre-pregnancy earnings who took paid family leave bore the brunt of the negative employment and earnings effects. Overall, our research suggests that the paid family leave insurance program has not narrowed the gender pay gap nor reduced the child penalty for mothers. On the contrary, the program may have exacerbated these gaps, especially among women earning lower wages. Finally, another counterintuitive finding is that paid family leave has not appeared to increase childbearing despite advocates’ claims to the contrary.

In short, even modest paid leave programs—with equal access for mothers and fathers—may unintentionally nudge women out of the labor force. Our findings also help interpret research on Europe’s paid leave programs, whose considerably more generous benefits have failed to eliminate the child penalty and gender pay gap over the past several decades. Given the growing research on the health and well-being benefits of paid family leave policies, US policymakers favoring these benefits may want to consider alternative implementation strategies to mitigate the potentially adverse effects on women’s employment and careers.

Note
This research brief is based on Martha Bailey et al., “The Long-Run Effects of California’s Paid Family Leave Act on Women’s Careers and Childbearing: New Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design and US Tax Data,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy (forthcoming).