How having children affects women’s careers

Gender inequality affects women’s economic and social outcomes in almost every domain. It is visible in pay, employment and earning gaps, patterns of occupational segregation, and the limited presence of women in leadership roles and political institutions.

These gaps widen further for women who take on a primary role in childrearing, often at precisely the moment when careers would otherwise accelerate.

A study from Germany shows that once they take on the task of raising children, women are assigned fewer analytical, complex and interactive tasks, particularly when they reduce their working hours — changes that can quietly narrow future opportunities for advancement.

In a recently published paper in the Journal of Marriage and Family titled The Job Task Penalty for Motherhood, Wiebke Schulz from Bremen University and Gundula Zoch from Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg analyse changes in job tasks among 1,978 women, drawing on data from the German National Educational Panel Study covering the period from 2011 to 2020.

They track changes in five key dimensions of job tasks given to women, across three waves spanning a 12-year period, including analytic, complex, autonomous, interactive and manual.

Related

Wiebke Schulz explained that interactive tasks often assume predictability and “being on call” for colleagues and clients. When caregiving constraints arise — or are assumed to rise — these tasks are easiest to reassign because they are usually coordination-heavy and time-sensitive.

Analytical or complex tasks can decline for two reasons. In some jobs, they require sustained concentration or ownership of longer work processes, which becomes harder under time pressure and fragmented schedules.

“But importantly, declines can also reflect managerial expectations: supervisors may pre-emptively steer mothers away from high-responsibility, high-growth tasks regardless of actual capacity,” Wiebke Schulz told Euronews Business.

She noted that after childbirth, many of the jobs or roles women are given shift away from “high-cognitive, high-interaction” work toward a narrower set of duties. The change is not just about switching jobs, it shows up as a change in what women do within their work lives after becoming mothers, especially when they work reduced hours.

Even small short-term task downgrades can accumulate. “If analytical, complex and interactive tasks are where skills grow, performance signals are produced, and leadership pipelines are built, then losing access to them can slow wage growth, reduce promotion chances, and lock people into flatter trajectories—even if job titles don’t change,” she said.

While the research covers Germany, the findings are broadly applicable and extend beyond its borders. She underlined that this is a broadly similar pattern across Europe, but the size and shape of the effect will vary with institutions and norms.

One way to address this is to make task allocation visible. Tracking who receives high-growth assignments — such as ownership of key clients, complex cases or project leadership — before and after parental leave or shifts to part-time work can reveal when and how opportunities quietly disappear.

Employers can also rethink how part-time roles are designed. By breaking complex work into modular tasks, formalising handovers and relying more on team-based ownership, analytical and high-responsibility work does not have to be treated as the preserve of full-time staff.

Another critical step is training managers to recognise expectation-based bias. The greatest risk is anticipatory reassignment: tasks are moved not because performance has changed, but because of assumptions about future availability or commitment.

Her policy recommendations are to expand full-day childcare and school coverage, strengthen rights to flexibility with career protections, and incentivise fathers’ leave and caregiving to reduce the “mother is the default adjuster” norm that shapes employer expectations.