Women with children earn £302 less every week than men with children: one-third less per week and almost 20% less per hour, according to analysis based on ONS data.
This means that Mums’ Equal Pay Day falls on 1 September this year, almost three months earlier than Equal Pay Day for all women. From this date, mothers are working for free for the rest of the year compared with fathers.
“The reason the gender pay gap worsens so significantly after having children is because starting a family has a disproportionately negative impact on women’s earnings,” said Joeli Brearley, the founder of Growth Spurt, an online back-to-work scheme for parents.
The analysis has been acknowledged as accurate by the Office for National Statistics. But the picture is really much worse, said Brearley, because it does not account for the many parents who become economically inactive owing to their caring responsibilities.
“Yet we know that women are much more likely to have been forced to leave their jobs due to childcare costs, maternity discrimination and a lack of suitable flexible working,” she said.
Pregnancy and maternity discrimination remain widespread: every year, about 74,000 women are forced to leave their jobs simply for getting pregnant or taking maternity leave, according to earlier analysis by Brearley. “The majority of mothers say they’ve faced some form of discrimination or disadvantage as a result of taking maternity leave, from missed promotions to being sidelined at work,” she said.
The cost and availability of childcare are still major barriers to women continuing work or taking up promotions, while the flexible and part-time roles many mothers need to balance work and care are too often low-paid and offer limited opportunities for progression.
Since women are more likely to request flexible working, Brearley said, they disproportionately bear the career penalty attached to these roles.
“And finally, our outdated parental leave system reinforces gendered expectations: mothers are encouraged, and often expected, to take extended time off, while fathers return to work quickly. This not only entrenches the idea that caregiving is ‘women’s work’, but also means men’s careers continue to progress while women’s stall,” she said.
Penny East, the chief executive of the Fawcett Society, which calculates the annual Equal Pay Day, welcomed the analysis.
“It’s significant that Mums’ Equal Pay Day falls so much earlier than Equal Pay Day,” she said. “Motherhood can create a financial cliff edge for many women. It’s also worth remembering that for many women the motherhood penalty and the gender pay gap conspire to create a pension pay gap, which pushes many women into pension poverty later in life,” she added.
“There is no good reason for any pay gap to exist and government and employers must do more to level the playing field for all women at every stage of our lives.”
Dr Mary-Ann Stephenson, the director of the Women’s Budget Group, said: “The research highlights how the earnings gap really opens up when women become mothers.
“We have a leave system which reinforces the gendered division of unpaid care, meaning that even couples who intend to share care more equally than their parents find that women are still the default parent.
“It’s really important that the government’s review of parental leave recognises how the current system is bad for everyone, and makes the reforms needed to allow parents to share both paid and unpaid work more fairly,” she said.
