(The Conversation) – Women in the U.S. typically earned 85% as much as men for every hour they spent working in 2024. However, working women are faring much better than their moms and grandmothers did 40 years ago. In the mid-1980s, women were making only 65% as much as men for every hour of paid work.
Women’s wages have improved relative to what men earn in part because of gains in their education and work experience, and because women have moved into higher-paying occupations. But progress toward pay equality has stalled.
As sociologists and demographers, we wanted to know whether changes in American families might also have helped women come closer to pay equality with men. In an article published in June 2025 in Social Forces, an academic journal, we argued that this pay gap is becoming smaller in part because women are having fewer children.
Moms earn less but dads earn more
In the U.S. and elsewhere, ample evidence shows that parenthood affects men’s and women’s wages differently.
Compared to remaining childless, motherhood leads to wage losses for women. And those losses are larger when women have more kids.
By contrast, after men become fathers their wages usually rise.
Because having kids tends to push women’s wages down and men’s wages up, parenthood widens the gender pay gap.
Decline in birth rate plays a role
Americans are having fewer kids in general. Women, including those who don’t work outside the home, had an average of about three children by their 40s in 1980. By 2000, that average had fallen to 1.9, and it has been fairly stable since then.
To see whether changes in how many kids working American moms have affects what they earn relative to men, we analyzed data collected from a nationally representative sample of U.S. families. We tracked trends over time in the number of children that employed Americans ages 30-55 have.
We found that employees’ average number of children fell significantly between 1980 and 2000, declining from around 2.4 to around 1.8. That average stabilized after 2000; employees had an average of about 1.8 children in 2018 – the most recent year in our analysis.
At the same time, the pay that women in this age range earned per hour relative to men rose steeply. It climbed from 58% in 1980 to 69% by 1990 and then rose more gradually to 76% by 2018. That is, as people were having fewer kids, the gender pay gap got smaller. For both trends, there was rapid change in the 1980s, followed by slower change after 1990.
We next estimated whether declines in the number of children men and women have can explain the narrowing of the gender pay gap between 1980 and 2018.
We found that, even after adjusting for other factors, such as years of education, prior work experience and occupation, about 8% of the decline in the gender pay gap can be explained by the lower number of children working women and men are having.
Next, we showed that the number of children American employees had declined faster in the 1980s than later on. That slowdown coincided with a deceleration of women’s gains in pay relative to men. Once the average number of children that U.S. employees had stabilized around 2000, so did women’s progress toward earning as much as men.
Questions about the future of US fertility
U.S. scholars and policymakers are debating whether and why Americans are having fewer children today than one or two decades ago, and what the government should do about it.
We agree that these are important questions.
Our research shows that any future changes in how many children Americans have are very likely to affect how quickly women and men reach pay equality. But it’s not inevitable.
The number of children Americans have affects the gender pay gap only because parenthood decreases women’s wages while increasing men’s wages. As long as these unequal effects of parenthood on what men and women earn persist, they will continue to act as a brake on women’s progress toward equal pay.
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