Congratulations to PhD candidate Manlin Cai for receiving the 2024 Canadian Population Society Student Paper Award!
The award competition serves to showcase the high quality of research in areas relevant to demography and encourages the participation of young scholars by providing a forum for paper presentation and feedback.
Manlin was awarded for her working paper, “Workplace Authority in China: Gender, Parenthood, and Work Sectors.”
Abstract
Prior research has documented that parenthood typically leads to lower wages for women but higher wages for men. However, do motherhood penalty and fatherhood premium extend beyond wages to other labor market outcomes?
Drawing on nationally representative, longitudinal data from the China Family Panel Studies (2010–2020), this study examines how gender and parenthood shape workplace authority in China and how these effects vary across work sectors.
Fixed-effects results show that women’s likelihood of holding authority decreases following parenthood, especially after they have two or more children, while no significant change is observed among men. In the state sector, there is no evident motherhood penalty in access to authority, whereas men receive a fatherhood premium. Conversely, in the private sector, mothers experience a considerable penalty in authority, with no evidence of a fatherhood premium. These patterns also apply to the scope of workplace authority.
The differential effects of parenthood on workplace authority between men and women may well produce and perpetuate gender inequalities in other realms of work and family lives.
