Motherhood derails women’s academic careers — these data reveal how and why

Mothers in academia take on considerably more childcare-related responsibilities than do fathers.

Becoming a parent is much more detrimental to women’s academic careers than it is to men’s, lowering their chances of getting university jobs and tenure, and reducing their publication output, finds a large analysis¹ of academics in Denmark. The reason, according to the study, is that women have almost five times the amount of childcare responsibilities that men have.

A lot has been done in Denmark to encourage both men and women to take parental leave, and attitudes around who should take on caregiving responsibilities are changing, says Sofie Cairo, an economist at Copenhagen Business School. “But behaviours change much more slowly than attitudes.”

Researchers have long documented the effects of parenthood on academic careers, particularly for women. Many studies have reported that women in science face ‘motherhood penalties’, such as lower wages and fewer promotions than men.

The latest study, published in March by the Centre for Economic Performance, a research centre based at the London School of Economics and Political Science, uses multiple large data sets to investigate how the direct effects of parenthood influence academic career outcomes. The authors of the study report that, although the career trajectories of men and women are similar before becoming parents, their paths diverge starkly after the birth of their first child.

Parenting penalties

Drawing on data from several Danish registries, Cairo and her colleagues gathered information from 13,347 parents who had been enrolled in a PhD programme at a Danish university between 1996 and 2017 and had had their first child sometime after the first year of their doctoral studies. The researchers combined these data with publication histories gathered from Elsevier’s Scopus citation database, as well as responses from a survey conducted at Danish universities in 2017 that covered topics such as career aspirations, work–life balance and childcare.

The team’s analyses revealed that, eight years after the arrival of their first child, women were 29% less likely to be employed at a university than if they had not become mothers; for men, the drop was 14% (see ‘Impact of parenthood on university employment’). And unlike fathers, mothers who left academia experienced a 12% reduction in earnings and were less likely to have jobs at research institutes and laboratories — suggesting that, after having children, many women not only exit academia, but also step away from research altogether (see ‘Impact of parenthood on research’).

There were differences in career trajectories for mothers and fathers who remained in academia, too. Mothers saw a significant decline in their chance of getting tenure (dropping by 35% three to four years after birth, and 23% lower after eight years) than if they hadn’t had children, whereas fathers experienced no discernible change. And although men continued to publish the same number of papers after becoming fathers, women experienced a significant drop in research output (mothers had 31% fewer publications than did fathers eight years after the birth of their first child). These differences between mothers and fathers were also present for academics who chose to postpone having children until after securing their first academic job — although to a lesser extent.

These data are “extremely rich” and the findings are “quite striking”, says Barbara Petrongolo, an economist at the University of Oxford, UK. Although similar gender gaps have been reported before, the latest study shows the impact of having children on women’s careers is large, even in Denmark, a country with relatively high levels of gender equality. (Denmark has both paid parental leave and subsidized childcare.)

The childcare gap

Three-quarters of 3,400 surveyed researchers agreed with the statement that “families usually function best if partners share childcare, household work, and paid work tasks equally”. In practice, however, women took on a disproportionate amount of childcare, with mothers being more likely to take care of their children at night and during sick days, and to be responsible for doctor visits and nursery pick-ups (see ‘Time spent caring for children’).

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00981-3

Cover photo:  After having their first child, women are 29% less likely to be employed at a university than if they had not become mothers.