Women find career bonus in delaying motherhood

By Repps Hudson
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

For Jennifer Lawton, finding a way to have both a career and a child was simple. All she had to do was finish four years of medical school, seven years of residency in surgery and a two-year fellowship in heart and lung surgery.

That's a total of 13 years after Lawton graduated from college, pre-med.

Then she could start a family. She and her husband of seven years, also a surgeon, had remained childless until they had a son eight months ago.

Before then, Lawton, 37, said she was in no position to have a child.

"I had long hours, no sleep, and you don't eat well," she said of her extended training as a cardiothoracic surgeon. She's now an assistant professor of surgery at Washington University's School of Medicine.

Lawton's timing for having her first child supports the thesis of Abbigail J. Chiodo and Michael T. Owyang: Women who postpone having children to establish careers are more likely to earn more money over their lifetimes.

Chiodo, a senior research associate at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and Owyang, an economist at the bank, argued their premise in the April issue of The Regional Economist.

"Time spent away from work has a negative effect on a woman's wages, because she sacrifices valuable experience," Chiodo and Owyang wrote in the St. Louis Fed's quarterly publication (available online at http://stlouisfed.org/publications/re/2003/b/pages/marriage.html).

A year ago in The Regional Economist, they noted that married men tend to make more money than men who have never married. They noted a strong correlation between marriage and men's willingness to shoulder more responsibility, which usually is rewarded at work with higher pay.

This year, they pursued the female side of the equation.

What they found in reviewing recent studies is that for women planning to "have it all," timing's everything. Many people understand this intuitively, but Chiodo and Owyang pored over studies that tried to quantify how a woman's desire to become a mother can affect her career.

Women who choose to have children in their 20s or early 30s, before they have become highly valued in their jobs, will pay a price, Chiodo and Owyang found.

"Children have direct effects toward the decreased time a woman spends on her career," Chiodo said in an interview.

A mother with a young child or children at home, Chiodo said, is less likely to volunteer to work long hours or weekends — things that may impress the boss and make one a candidate for additional responsibilities, promotions and more pay.