The gender of the first child and parental outcomes in the UK

In this paper we investigate the existence of child penalty in the United Kingdom, where there are potentially no institutional or cultural hurdles to divide household tasks in a gender neutral way. Furthermore, we ask whether the gender of the first child affects parental outcomes. Our identification strategy relies on the assumption that the gender of the firstborn child is exogenous conditional on the decision to have a child. We identify the effects from changes in behaviour within person before and after the birth of their first child, by exploiting the panel data structure of the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS). We find large and persistence negative effects of the first parenthood on women’s real wage, working hours and employment, while paternal labour market outcomes are almost unaffected. We also show the discrepancies in the various measurements of general happiness and subjective well-being among fathers and mothers. We analyze to which extent these differences in parental outcomes are driven by the child gender and whether it is rooted in education, political and gender views of the parents.