It pays to be a married dad whose wife works full time

April 29, 2013
It pays to be a dad whose wife works full time.

Married, biological fathers who live with their families are associated with a wage bonus of about four percent after they have kids, according to a new study by Alexandra Killewald.

When the pot-smoking, financially irresponsible protagonist in the 2007 comedy Knocked Up becomes an expectant father, he attempts to reconcile his life with impending fatherhood. He bids adieu to his slacker roommates and their dreams of launching a celebrity porn website, and we next see him painting a nursery in a newly procured apartment. The biggest change of all: Taking a job in an office.

This illustrates something people have long assumed: The responsibilities associated with fatherhood motivate men to work a bit harder and move into more lucrative careers. Harvard sociologist Alexandra Killewald had certainly read research that corroborated this theory, but wondered if "the fatherhood premium," which asserts that entry into fatherhood will produce wage gains if it prompts altered behavior, held true for all dads.

In the her recent paper in American Sociological Review, "A Reconsideration of the Fatherhood Premium: Marriage, Coresidence, Biology, and the Wages of Fathers," Killewald shows that the wage gain does in fact exist, but that boost is not available to everyone. Read the full article "It pays to be a married dad whose wife works full time" (by Alexis Coe, The Atlantic, January 20, 2013).