When Should I Have a Baby?

In elite professions, such as law and business, the crucial years for launching a career overlap with women's prime childbearing years. Women who work in these professions face a choice: have a child early and risk being derailed from the fast-track versus delay childbearing until one is successfully established. But exactly how much delaying childbirth improves professional women's long-term earnings growth is unknown, and no previous studies have investigated how birth timing and labor cutbacks interact to affect earnings growth. We fill these gaps by examining relationships between timing of first birth, labor supply cutbacks for childcare and earnings growth over a twenty-four year career span for women lawyers with children who graduated from the University of Michigan Law School between 1976 and 1981. We define early career mothers as those women who had their first child during the first five years after law school graduation, and late career mothers as those who had their first child after this time. We estimate models predicting earnings change between years one and twenty-four as a function of birth timing, labor supply cutbacks, and the interaction between the birth timing and labor supply cutbacks measures. Having a child early in one's career and dialing back labor supply for childcare are both associated with lower earnings growth. Only late career mothers who never cut back labor supply for childcare have earnings trajectories that resemble those of fathers from the same law school classes. Among mothers who never cut back labor supply, late career mothers have a 60 percent earnings growth advantage over early career mothers. Surprisingly, early career mothers and late career mothers are equally likely to dial back labor supply. We also find that the negative effect of labor supply reductions on wage growth is larger for late career mothers than for early career mothers.