Educational hypogamy is associated with a smaller child penalty on women's earnings

This study examines how becoming a parent changes the earnings gap between partners, and how that ‘child penalty’ differs depending on the education level of each partner and the woman's relative education within the couple. Using register data on 268,156 Austrian couples who had their first child between 1990 and 2007, we track their earnings before and after childbirth in an event-study framework that uses the couple as the unit of analysis. We find that women who are more educated than their partners (hypogamous couples) face a smaller penalty than women whose partners have the same or a higher education level (homogamous or hypergamous couples). Multivariate models that adjust for the different composition of couple types confirm this pattern. A more detailed examination of specific educational pairings reveals strong heterogeneity in the size of the child penalty: women with tertiary education in hypogamous unions experience the smallest penalties, while those in hypergamous unions with tertiary-educated partners face the largest. Supplementary analyses indicate that the smaller penalties for tertiary-educated women in hypogamous unions do not reflect a selection of low-earning men into these partnerships.