Women still have to bear children, and pregnancy takes a heavy toll on the body, which often results in several fewer years in the workforce, on average.
Unless that changes — or we start paying mothers with less experience more money — there will always be a gap.
Edit: because liberals/tankies like to ignore reality as much as fascists when the truth is inconvenient.
Your links, especially the WEF link, support the correlation, but explicitly describe a confounding variable as being household work (especially childcare). And that’s consistent with the observation that the motherhood penalty has a different magnitude for different countries and different industries. All that suggests that a combination of household division of labor, parental leave policies (either employer policies or government regulations), and workplace accommodations generally can make a big difference.
None of this is inevitable or immutable. We can learn from the countries and the industries where the motherhood penalty is lower, or doesn’t last as long.
Women still have to bear children, and pregnancy takes a heavy toll on the body, which often results in several fewer years in the workforce, on average.
Unless that changes — or we start paying mothers with less experience more money — there will always be a gap.
Edit: because liberals/tankies like to ignore reality as much as fascists when the truth is inconvenient.
“the arrival of children has a large and persistent impact on the gender earnings gap, reducing female earnings by 55 per cent, on average, in the 5 years following parenthood. We further show, using personal income tax data collected by the Australian Tax Office (ATO), that this gap improves only slightly but remains high in the 10 years following the arrival of children.”
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/05/reduce-motherhood-penalty-gender-pay-gap/
https://theconversation.com/the-motherhood-pay-gap-why-womens-earnings-decline-after-having-children-220207
Your links, especially the WEF link, support the correlation, but explicitly describe a confounding variable as being household work (especially childcare). And that’s consistent with the observation that the motherhood penalty has a different magnitude for different countries and different industries. All that suggests that a combination of household division of labor, parental leave policies (either employer policies or government regulations), and workplace accommodations generally can make a big difference.
None of this is inevitable or immutable. We can learn from the countries and the industries where the motherhood penalty is lower, or doesn’t last as long.