By Emma Johnson
Ultimately, working-mom guilt leads some women to drop out of the workforce, take less-demanding and lower-paying positions. Long-term, they rarely catch up, and collectively, this keeps the pay gap alive and well. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a woman’s earnings plummet by 30 percent after being out of the workforce for two to three years.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, of the Atlantic article “Why Women Can’t Have it All,”brought to the forefront the “mommy tax.” Studies find that men and women earn about the same in their first jobs out of college, and women without children earn about 95 percent of their male professional and educational peers. But the mommy tax rears its head when women start having babies. Slaughter told the podcast Freakonomics:
