Biography: Katie R. Genadek is the Director of the Decennial Census Digitization and Linkage (DCDL) project and an Economist working at the U.S. Census Bureau. She is also a faculty associate at the University of Colorado – Boulder. She previously worked at the University of Minnesota where she managed the IPUMS-USA data project. She is a demographer and economist, and her research is focused on the relationship between policy, work, family, and time use.

More information about Dr. Genadek may be accessed here.

Motherhood Wage Penalties over the Life-Course in the United States: Results from Administrative Data
Abstract: Women with children are shown to experience a motherhood wage penalty, and it is often assumed leaving the labor force for long periods results in the growth of this penalty. However, there has been limited investigations into the relationship between the length of time out of the labor force and the wage penalties related to it. This study uses administrative data linked to survey data to investigate is the relationship between time out of employment and over the life course for mothers. This unique dataset includes yearly earnings data from 1950s-the present from the Social Security Administration (SSA) for respondents in the Current Population Survey (CPS) Annual Social and Economic Supplement data from 2001-present. By linking these two data sets, along with information on births from SSA, this longitudinal dataset is one of the most comprehensive panels of women’s fertility, employment, and wage trajectories ever created for the United States. We find non-linear impacts of years out of employment on wages for mothers over the life course and will investigate demographic and socio-economic variation in life-cycle wages by years spent out of the labor force.