Dutch Mothers’ Employment Income Falls 33% After First Child, New Study Finds

Women’s earnings from work in the Netherlands still take a large hit after the birth of a first child, but the drop has become materially smaller over time, according to new research from Statistics Netherlands.

Women who had their first child between 2016 and 2018 and were in work beforehand earned 32.8% less six years later than in the year before childbirth, while fathers in the same cohort saw their employment income fall 3.1%. The agency presented the figures in its Emancipation Monitor 2026, which tracks gender gaps in work, income, education, health and safety.

The gap is large, but the new data also show a long-run improvement. Mothers who had their first child between 1996 and 2001 recorded a 57.4% decline in income from work over the same six-year window. Statistics Netherlands said the more recent outcome reflects, at least in part, that mothers now work more hours on average than mothers in earlier cohorts. The official CBS release did not frame the result as an immediate salary cut after childbirth. Instead, it compared gross annual income from employment or self-employment in the year before the first child with income six years later.

Income penalty narrows, but mothers still absorb most of the setback

That distinction matters because the 33% figure is best read as a medium-term earnings effect rather than a one-year wage shock. CBS based the measure on tax data from its Integrated Income and Wealth Survey and restricted the analysis to men and women who were employed before the birth of their first child. It then compared each birth cohort’s pre-birth income with income six years later.

Measured that way, the so-called baby penalty remains overwhelmingly concentrated among mothers. Fathers in the 1996 to 2001 cohort actually posted a 1.6% increase in income six years after their first child, according to the historical comparison published by CBS. Later male cohorts showed only small declines, including falls of 0.7%, 1.5%, 1.6%, a 0.5% increase, and finally a 3.1% decline for the 2016 to 2018 group. The pattern suggests that the long-run earnings adjustment associated with having a first child continues to be carried far more by women than by men, even as the size of the penalty for mothers has become smaller.

The new findings also sit alongside broader Dutch labour-market data showing that female participation is high by European standards, but that part-time work remains much more common among women. CBS’s wider gender-equality indicators showed 69.3% labour participation for women aged 15 to 74 in 2025, compared with 77.2% for men, while 65% of women aged 25 to 64 worked part-time. That helps explain why a narrowing baby penalty does not automatically mean the income gap has closed.

Childcare preferences and working-time patterns still pull in different directions

CBS paired the income analysis with survey evidence on work and care inside households, and that evidence helps explain why the gap remains persistent. About two-thirds of both women and men in heterosexual couples with children under 18 said they would prefer childcare to be shared equally. In practice, only 40.1% said care was actually shared equally.

Most of the remaining households still reported that mothers shoulder more of the work. CBS said 47.8% described women as doing slightly more childcare and 7.4% said mothers did most of it. Very few respondents said fathers handled more care than mothers. The mismatch between preferences and daily arrangements suggests that attitudes have moved faster than household practice.

The same tension shows up in working hours. Among mothers with a child under four, 57.0% worked 20 to 34 hours a week in 2025, 18.1% worked 35 hours or more, and 15.9% had no paid work. For fathers, 74.5% worked 35 hours or more, while only 20.0% worked 20 to 34 hours. Survey respondents, however, were more likely to say fathers should work fewer hours and mothers should work somewhat more moderate schedules than the current split implies.

Men were also less likely than women to say mothers and fathers are equally suited to childcare. CBS said 55% of men and 67% of women held that view, while 41% of men said women were better suited to looking after children. That gap in attitudes does not prove why earnings diverge after childbirth, but it is consistent with a labour market and a home-care pattern in which mothers still make the larger adjustment.

What the Dutch study does and does not show

The CBS findings add nuance to an issue that is often reduced to a single headline number. The study does not say every Dutch mother loses one-third of her pay immediately after having a child, nor does it claim that childbirth alone mechanically causes the full change in earnings for every household. It reports an average change in annual employment income over a six-year period for people who had already been working before becoming parents.

That methodology also means the figures capture a mix of outcomes, including fewer hours, career pauses, switching into different jobs and self-employment patterns. Some mothers work more than earlier generations did, and the long-term income decline has therefore narrowed compared with the late 1990s and early 2000s cohorts. Even so, the latest cohort still shows a strikingly large gap between mothers and fathers.

The broader Emancipation Monitor points to progress in other areas as well as remaining imbalances. CBS said 70% of women of working age were economically independent in 2024, compared with 82.6% of men, and the gender pay gap in hourly wages narrowed to 9.7% in 2025. Those gains show that women have improved their position in the labour market on several measures. The first-child income penalty, however, remains one of the clearest illustrations of how paid work and care responsibilities continue to be distributed unevenly.

For policymakers, employers and families, the report offers both a positive and a cautionary reading. The penalty attached to motherhood is not as severe as it was twenty years ago, which suggests that social norms and work patterns have shifted. The persistence of a roughly one-third earnings decline six years after a first child, however, indicates that the Dutch labour market still has not solved the core problem that parenthood changes men’s and women’s career paths in very different ways.