Parenthood Premiums and Penalties Among Asian American Workers: Exploring the Income Differences Across Gender, Marriage, and Parenthood

Abstract

This study uses the Current Population Survey to explore the intersections of gender, marriage, and parenthood on Asian American workers’ labor market outcomes. Asian Americans are unique socioeconomically compared to other racial/ethnic minority groups in the US that have been historically and contemporarily disadvantaged. Previous studies measuring the economic attainments of Asian Americans found that both men and women are nearing income parity with White Americans (Greenman 2010, Kim and Sakamoto 2010). However, this raises the question of whether familial factors (i.e., marriage and parenthood) differentially affect Asian American workers’ yearly income and how this may vary by gender at multiple points of the income distribution. I use OLS and quantile regression models to analyze the intraracial gender differences in income by marriage and parenthood factors. Among Asian American workers, I find that men benefit from both the fatherhood and marriage premium. Still, married fathers and single fathers have comparable income suggesting parenthood drives the overall increase in income rather than marriage. Asian American mothers are not affected by the motherhood penalty and see a slight increase in pay after having children, whereas married mothers show negligible differences in pay relative to single mothers. Further, there are larger pay discrepancies among workers in the upper third of the income distribution for married parents, suggesting there is still a gender pay gap regardless of the variation in marital and parental statuses. These findings imply that gendered and racialized views within the labor market influence the perceptions of Asian American workers and produce diverse economic outcomes.