Does a Motherhood Penalty Exist in the Post- apartheid South African Labour Market?

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Mlatsheni, Cecil
Copyright Year	2018
Abstract	Do working mothers earn less than non-mothers in the South African labour market? This study examines whether there exists a motherhood (or child) penalty for Black African female employees in post-apartheid South Africa using two cross sections from the National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) data between 2008 and 2014. NIDS is the first be the first nationally representative survey in South African to include comprehensive child birth history. Restricting analysis to women aged 20 to 49, the Mincerian regression model results indicate that a motherhood penalty does exist, ceteris paribus. Moreover, the study uses unconditional quantile regressions (RIF-OLS) to examine the wage returns of mothers versus non-mothers along the wage distribution. The study finds that there exists a motherhood wage penalty at lower wage levels, but this effect wanes in prominence at higher wage quantiles. At higher wage levels, mothers earn higher wages than their child-free counterparts, especially if they are married. The study then applies Oaxaca-Blinder type decompositions within the RIF framework to decompose changes in the motherhood wage gap along the distribution into explained and unexplained contributions related to a range of factors. The decomposition results indicate that at 10 and 90 quantiles, the wages of mothers minus wages of non-mothers is negative, but positive everywhere else. Moreover, the majority of the wage differential between mothers and non-mothers is due to unexplained characteristics. This implies that there are additional relevant factors such as societal norms, selection effects into employment and behavioural characteristics should be considered when analysing women's wage outcomes. The prevalence of migrant work is an important element when considering the economic decisions of Black women with biological children compared to women without children in the South African labour market.
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://www.dpme.gov.za/publications/NIDS%20Wave%205/Motherhood%20Penalty.pdf
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://www.opensaldru.uct.ac.za/bitstream/handle/11090/962/2019_247_Saldruwp.pdf?sequence=1
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article