Motherhood wage penalties and labour market segmentation: Evidence from Argentina

This article explores the connection between labour market segregation and
motherhood wage penalties in Argentina across the formal and informal sectors. It
uses ordinary least square and quantile regression estimation strategies and deploys
Blinder-Oaxaca and Ñopo decompositions to identify sources of wage differences.
The finding is that there is strong evidence of labour market segmentation and that
motherhood wage penalties differ substantively across the sectors and between
different wage quantiles. In particular, formal-sector working mothers do not
experience wage penalties, while informal ones do. The motherhood wage penalty
increases with the number of children, especially younger children, and is greatest
at the bottom and next greatest at the top of the conditional wage distribution.