A report by the Fawcett Society, the gender equality charity, has found that black and minority ethnic women are impacted the most by the “motherhood pay penalty”. This is the gap in pay of 26% faced by mothers with two children compared to women without children.

Entitled “The Ethnicity Motherhood Pay Penalty Report” and supported by the #EthnicityPayGap campaign, the research is the first of its kind to break down the pay penalty by not only gender but also ethnicity.

According to Fawcett, the biggest driver of the motherhood pay penalty is a reduction in the number of hours worked by mothers. This report shows that the options for picking up more hours after having children are limited for black and minority ethnic women because of the dual impacts of sexism and racism, with many dropping out of the workforce entirely.

The research also found that:

  • While mothers of all ethnicities move into part-time work at similar rates, there are stark differences by ethnicity in the number of mothers who leave the workforce completely.
  • The employment rate of white mothers is five percentage points lower than that of white women without children, whilst women of Indian, black African, and Chinese heritage experience penalties of up to 11 percentage points compared with women without children of their own ethnicities.
  • 38% of mothers of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage are employed as opposed to 55% of all women in the same ethnic group.

Fawcett is calling on the government to:

  • Legislate for affordable and culturally sensitive education and childcare.
  • Make flexible work the default via an advertising duty.
  • Make ethnicity pay gap reporting mandatory for employers with 100+ employees.

The charity is also calling on employers to

  • Ensure flexible work becomes the default working practice, with advertisements that include flexible work options such as compressed hours, job sharing and working from home.
  • Report on ethnicity and gender pay gaps.
  • Give employees the right to know outcomes of pay gap reviews.
  • Create action plans to address any gaps raised in the reports.

To read the report in full, click here.