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This study aims to estimate motherhood penalty in Russia and to compare its size across groups of women with different educational levels. Authors use the 2014 Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) data and show that the net wage gap between mothers and childless women is higher among less educated women. To deal with the highly probable selection to motherhood bias, authors estimate a logit regression with independent covariates including age, educational level, partner status, and type of settlement, and calculate a conditional probability of being a mother for each woman in the sample. This probability then serves as weight for log-linear models, where authors estimate influence of the woman’s motherhood status, type and sphere of employment, and all the same independent covariates on the logarithm of the monthly wage. In this case significant influence of the motherhood status on the wages is observed only for women with higher education, and it reaches 8% if they have children under 18 years old, but becomes insignificant if their children are older.

motherhood penalty, Russia