Women remain underrepresented in senior academic positions across Europe and beyond. A new study shows that parenthood plays a central role in explaining why.
In the paper Parenthood and the Career Ladder: Evidence from Academia, Sofie Cairo, Ria Ivandić, Anne Sophie Lassen, and Valentina Tartari examine how becoming a parent affects academic careers. Their central question is whether motherhood and fatherhood have different consequences for staying in academia and reaching senior positions.
This question matters because academia shapes research, education, and public debate. If women are more likely to leave academic careers after having children, this affects not only gender equality but also who produces knowledge and holds leadership roles in science.
Parenthood as a Turning Point in Academic Careers
The researchers answer this question using detailed administrative data from Denmark. The data cover the full population of individuals who have ever enrolled in a PhD program between 1996 and 2017 and are linked to information on employment, academic rank, publications, and family formation.
The study follows researchers over time and compares their career paths before and after the birth of their first child. This approach allows the authors to isolate the impact of parenthood on academic employment, tenure, and research output.
Before parenthood, men and women follow very similar career trajectories. They have comparable employment rates in universities and similar chances of reaching tenure, a permanent senior position such as associate professor or full professor.
After the first child is born, their paths diverge sharply. One in three women leaves academia after becoming a mother. Eight years after the first child, mothers are 15 percent less likely than fathers to be employed at a university.
The divergence is even more pronounced when it comes to tenure. While fatherhood has no measurable effect on men’s chances of becoming tenured, mothers experience a persistent decline. Eight years after childbirth, women are 23 percent less likely than men to hold a tenured position.
Research productivity also changes. Mothers publish less after childbirth, both in terms of the number of publications and when adjusted for journal quality, while fathers’ publication records remain largely unaffected.
Importantly, most of the tenure gap is driven by women leaving academia rather than only by slower career progression within academia. When women exit academic employment, they also exit the tenure track. This early exit plays a key role in why fewer women reach senior positions later on.
Why Mothers Face Larger Career Penalties
The authors also examine possible explanations. One hypothesis is that women and men differ in career aspirations. Survey data from academics and PhD students show no such gap: men and women express similar interest in research careers and similar views on job conditions within academia.
Another explanation concerns childcare responsibilities. The survey reveals large gender differences in who takes on childcare, especially time-intensive and unpredictable tasks such as caring for sick children or getting up at night. These responsibilities can reduce working hours and make it harder to work in focused, uninterrupted blocks of time.
The study also examines whether supportive family arrangements reduce the penalty. For example, it looks at whether having a partner with a PhD, taking paternity leave, or having access to retired grandmothers changes the outcomes. These factors do not appear to substantially reduce the motherhood penalty.
Workplace characteristics also play a role. Women trained in departments without senior female role models face larger penalties. Similarly, highly competitive and research-intensive departments are associated with stronger negative effects of parenthood on women’s tenure prospects.
Overall, the findings suggest that parenthood is a major driver of gender inequality in academia. Child penalties explain around 70 percent of the gender gap in academic employment and about 40 percent of the gap in tenure.
What the Findings Mean Beyond Academia
These patterns may also apply to other demanding professions that require long working hours, strong professional networks, and limited flexibility, such as those of lawyers, management consultants, and business executives.
In some other high-paying occupations, such as medicine and pharmacy, career structures have been organized in ways that are more compatible with motherhood. One important feature is systems that allow cases or responsibilities to be transferred between individuals.
As long as careers are structured in ways that make parenthood particularly costly for women, this will shape who remains in these professions and who advances to leadership roles.
Addressing unequal childcare responsibilities and rethinking career structures – perhaps so that the most demanding career years do not overlap with the years when many people want to start a family – may therefore be central to reducing gender gaps at the top of many professions.
The findings highlight how parenthood – particularly motherhood – continues to shape who remains in academia and who advances to its most senior ranks.
Reference
This study is published as a working paper in the Berlin School of Economics Discussion Papers series:
