Women in Britain who work part-time have, on average, hourly earnings about 25% less than that of women working full-time. This gap has widened greatly over the past 30 years. This paper tries to explain this part-time pay penalty. It shows that a sizeable part of the penalty can be explained by...

Motherhood is usually associated with lower wages due to a number of reasons such as career interruptions, potentially decreased productivity/effort, and discrimination. Earlier literature provides a range of estimates from an up to 20% wage penalty in economies with more flexible labor markets...