Study shows how working moms make 30% less than working fathers

WASHINGTON — Working mothers often make significantly less than their male counterparts.

A new study by Bankrate shows that working moms sometimes make as much as 30% less than working fathers due to what’s known as the motherhood penalty.

Channel 2 Washington Correspondent Candice Cole tracked the result of the study and spoke to experts about what working moms can do to reverse the trend.

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“Full-time working mothers actually had the largest pay gap with en out of all the groups we analyzed,” Alex Gailey, an analyst at Bankrate, told Channel 2 Action News.

The study found that working mothers earned just 76 cents for every dollar working fathers earn.

“That’s equivalent to nearly a 31% difference,” Gailey said.

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Dollar to dollar, it’s close to $1,400 less per month or $17,000 less annually for working moms with children under the age of 18, who have to pay for everything from diapers to daycare, team uniforms and everything else in between.

Over 30 years -- the average career span -- that gap in pay can mean more than half-a-million dollars in lost wages, according to further analysis by Cole. That’s compared to the “fatherhood bonus,” which gives men with kids an average pay bump of 23%, according to the study, Cole found.

“When women have children and in the workforce, they’re more likely to be seen as less committed,” Gailey said.

In today’s workforce, there are more mothers than ever before. Part of what’s driving the pay gap is women taking lower-paying, more flexible jobs which allow them to take on more of the caregiving and household responsibilities for their families.

The motherhood penalty also contributes to higher levels of stress for working mothers, giving them more stress than parenting, according to the study.

To deal with that, Gailey recommended working moms “Really be proactive, make sure they’re actively saving, actively paying down any debt they have, investigating as soon as possible.”

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