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The motherhood wage penalty in Turkey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 May 2022

Hayriye Özgül Özkan Değirmenci
Hayriye Özgül Özkan Değirmenci*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Department of Economics, Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University, Kötekli, Muğla, Turkey Email: ozguldegirmenci@mu.edu.tr
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Abstract

Women with children, on average, earn lower wages than those who do not have children. This is called the “motherhood wage penalty”. This study provides estimates of the wage penalty for working mothers in Turkey using the Turkish Household Labor Force Survey (HLFS), 2014–2018. The gross wage penalty is 21.3 percent, but it is entirely explained by human capital variables: education, marital status, and potential experience in the pooled cross-section. The bulk of the gross penalty is attributable to the higher educational attainment of the subsample of non-mothers compared to mothers. When the wage-setting mechanisms in the public versus private sectors, and differences in fertility exposure by age cohort conditional on education are accounted for, a clearer picture emerges. Empirical findings indicate that the wage penalty does not exist for mothers employed in the public sector but that there is a 3 percent penalty for mothers working in the private sector, with the highest value being 6.1 percent for university-educated young mothers. In addition, wage losses are higher for the younger age cohort, presumably due to leaves of absence from work for time spent caring for young children, which lead to skill erosion.

Keywords

Motherhood wage penaltydifferences by educationage cohortpublic-private sectorTurkey
Type
Article
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 66 , May 2022 , pp. 35 - 60
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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