Can you to imagine a world without care, a world without teachers, nurses or childcare workers? Caring for others is a crucial part of society, and care workers are in fact essential for its functioning. At the same time, the devaluation of care work pervades our society. Care work carries little prestige and economic rewards, and tends to be dismissed as not really work. Women and women of color have long been the ones providing care to others, in and out of the workforce. However, past research has shown that women experience major declines in their wages after having children, the so-called ‘motherhood penalty’. This is especially the case in highly skilled/high paid jobs and in professional occupations, such as among doctors or lawyers or business professionals. Researchers often explain this phenomenon by pointing to the expectations that employers have about who makes the most ideal worker. In their eyes, this ideal worker is typically a man with no outside responsibilities such as caretaking. Men, in fact, tend to experience a ‘daddy bonus’, with higher wages for fathers compared to men with no kids. Furthermore, the wage penalties are less harsh for women of color, though they typically start with lower wages than white women do. Fathers of color do not experience the same boost to their wages as white fathers do.We wanted to explore whether this penalty existed in other fields. Specifically, we wanted to look at care work, a field that both employs great numbers of women and mothers, but also typically expects the same traits from workers that society expects in mothers. In previous research, researchers found that even though caring work requires similar levels of education and skill as professional occupations, is underappreciated and devalued because it is done by women. Employers believe that since women are naturally good at care work, work that value traits such as caring, love, and selflessness, don’t need to be paid as much. However, we were interested in seeing whether this devaluation has held true, even with advancements in gender equality. We thought that since care work employers value the same skills valued in mothers, one’s parental identity might lead a worker to receiving a wage boost. We also expected that mothers of color would receive even greater boosts as employers expect them to possess caring traits in more abundance.

In our study, we drew on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which collects work and family related information from a nationally representative sample of the U.S. population. We analyzed data on over 805,786 care workers between the ages of 18 and 37, collected in the years 1980, 1990, and then yearly from 2000 through 2018 . We looked at jobs such as nursing, health care aides, K-12 teachers, social workers, childcare workers, and religious clergy members. Our findings are straightforward and reflect how gendered work and society is today. We show that wages for mothers are more than 12% lower than wages for women without children, accounting for factors like education, region, and work experience. This confirms that the motherhood wage penalty found for professional occupations also holds for care workers. We find that, within care work, this penalty is strongest for white women, although women of all races experience a decline in their wages after parenthood. However, we need to keep in mind that women of color tend to have lower starting wages compared to white women and men. We also find higher wages for fathers compared to men without children; however, that is not the case when accounting for work and personal variables—such as education level, marital status, and race—and actually Black fathers see a slight decline in wages compared to men without children. This may suggest that fathers of color continue to be seen as unfit or not appropriate for caring occupations, despite their fatherhood identity.

Overall, our research shows that in care work being seen as appropriate often doesn’t result in wage advantages. Instead, organizational practices and culture perpetrate disadvantage for mothers and people of color. Work and society today are still deeply gendered. The belief that mothers are better at caring and the fact that caring labor is devalued continue to disadvantage mothers and mothers of color alike, reinforcing gender inequality.

Overall, we think that these findings indicate that the beliefs that mothers are better at caring and that caring labor is devalued are pervasive and continue to disadvantage mothers and mothers of color alike. As Anne-Marie Slaughter, in her book Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family said, “If we’re going to get to real equality between men and women, we have to focus less on women and more on elevating the value of care.” As it would seem, motherhood is rife with more than just one type of labor pain.

Anna Manzoni is a professor at North Carolina State University. You can follow Anna on Twitter @theitalianna