Publish or Procreate: The Effect of Motherhood on Academic Performance

Abstract: Women are underrepresented in science and representation deficits are even greater for more senior positions and in the STEM fields. The dominant explanation is that male and female scientists, even within the same field, publish at unequal rates. Prior studies suggest that the gender gap in academic productivity reflects differential effects of childbearing on men and women, as women face tensions between the greedy institutions of family and academia. However, previous cross-sectional and longitudinal studies comparing childless and parent academics incur the risk of selection and survival bias, which may explain their mixed results. This motivates our study of the unequal effects of parenthood on scientific productivity among STEM academics in Denmark. Leveraging a unique combination of administrative registers on childbirths and granular bibliometrics on publications, our event study follows individual productivity of academics across the birth of their first child. Our empirical strategy exploits quasi-random variation in timing of birth, overcomes endogenous selection and survival bias originating from, e.g., differential attrition after birth, and is robust to field- and individual-specific productivity levels. We find that the first childbirth is accompanied by annual penalties of 23 percentage points on scientific productivity of mothers in the STEM fields relative to fathers until the child reaches school age. Differential attrition explains at most 1/5 of the penalty. Finally, investigating barriers and mitigating factors in the work and home environment of individual scientists, we find that women academics in the laboratory-intensive fields and women lacking support from partners and informal networks incur greater motherhood penalties. Overall, our results underline that gender inequality in science may reflect unequal impacts of parenthood on the scientific productivity of mothers and fathers

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