Childbirth slashes women’s earnings and employment for a decade

Dec 04, 2025, 09:13 am

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An illustration of working women in the office. / Courtesy of Gemini

Expectations that women can continue working after childbirth significantly raise their willingness to have children, a new analysis has found.

At the “2025 Panel Survey Academic Conference” hosted by the Korean Women’s Development Institute (KWDI) at LSW Convention in Seoul on the 4th, senior researcher Kim Eun-ji presented findings based on preliminary data from the 2024 Generations and Gender Survey (GGS Korea). The study analyzed responses from 1,059 men and women aged 19 to 44.

Among women, fertility intentions rose sharply when they viewed it as realistically possible to remain in the workforce after giving birth. The effect was especially pronounced among women without children and those in the low- and middle-income brackets.

Men, by contrast, showed a generally higher intention to have children than women, but their expectations about women’s post-birth employment had only a limited impact on their own fertility plans.

“Fertility intentions are closely tied not only to personal values but also to the practical conditions that allow women to keep working after childbirth,” Kim said. “We need to move away from the traditional family model and toward a social structure where career and family aspirations can be pursued in parallel.”

Another presentation identified childbirth as a major trigger for women’s exit from the labor market.

“While men experience little change in their labor-market outcomes after childbirth, women see clear and persistent declines in employment, income and working hours,” said Lee Seo-hyun, a research fellow at KWDI. “In particular, women’s employment rates and earnings drop sharply right after childbirth and tend not to recover even ten years later.” She added that the “motherhood penalty” is more severe in groups where traditional gender-role attitudes are stronger.

Some researchers argued that restoring social trust and spreading gender equality must come first in any response to Korea’s low birthrate. Based on an analysis of Women and Family Panel Survey data from 2008 to 2024, Kim Eun-jung, associate research fellow at the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, found that perceptions among women aged 25 to 35 of marriage and childbirth as “necessary” declined steeply around 2014. She linked this shift to “a period when the Sewol ferry disaster, ‘Hell Joseon’ discourse, and intensifying gender conflict converged, creating social instability and deepening distrust of government.”

Kim stressed that policy needs to match the pragmatic mindset of those born in the 1990s. “The key is to minimize career breaks and other penalties caused by marriage and childbirth, and to build an environment in which having children is not a social or economic loss,” she said.

#Motherhood penalty #Female employment and income #Fertility intentions #Traditional gender roles #Low birthrate policy