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New CES Working Paper "Female Executives and the Motherhood Penalty" ” by Seth Murray, @dhsandler, and Matthew Staiger. Thread 
https://www.census.gov/library/working-papers/2021/adrm/CES-WP-21-03.html
Our research question: Does having female leadership affect the motherhood penalty experienced by employees at a firm?
To motivate this question, we show that having kids has a big effect on the male-female earnings gap in our data (in addition to the large literature that also shows this).
Childbirth penalties account for around 2/3 of mothers’ earnings gaps in their mid-to-late 30s, relative to women without children
We also show that male-female earnings gaps are smaller in industries with a larger share of female executives, and it has fallen in industries where the sex composition of leadership has become more female
Despite this, we find no evidence that the number of female top earners at a firm has an effect on the motherhood penalty experienced by employees at the firm
Our identification comes from a matched co-worker strategy. For each woman that gives birth, we match her to a similar female co-worker at the same firm who have not given birth recently (5 years around matched birth).
We do a bunch of heterogeneity analyses. Although the size of the motherhood penalty varies across subsamples, the difference across firms with different numbers of female executives remains small and insignificant.
For instance: pre-birth earning quartile
For instance: pre-birth earning quartile
We don’t see a difference even at small firms. (I was sure we would see something here).
I’m going to end the thread with the graphs showing heterogeneity by race/ethnicity of the mother. They also show no effect from the sex composition of the top earners at the firm, but the differences in the patterns of the motherhood penalty are super interesting.
