A new baby creates an extraordinary amount of work, most of it unpaid and much of it invisible. There’s the physical recovery, the round-the-clock feeding, the bottles and pump parts, the pediatrician appointments, the sleepless nights and the daily effort of keeping the rest of the household functioning. When one parent returns to paid work, none of that labor disappears—it simply becomes someone else’s responsibility.
Vice President JD Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance welcomed their fourth child, Alec Neel Vance, on July 19. Before the baby’s birth, Vance said he did not plan to take a formal paternity leave because his position made it “impossible to completely disconnect.” Instead, he said he expected to spend more time at home and incorporate his children into his working schedule. Usha Vance, meanwhile, would take what he described as a long period away from the public eye.
Obviously we don’t know how the Vances divide childcare inside their home, how much support they have or what arrangement feels right for their family, but the public distinction is strikingly familiar: A father remains visibly attached to his work, while a mother becomes less visible so she can care for their new baby.
For most American families, that arrangement unfolds without White House resources. A dad might not take leave because it’s unpaid, because he earns more, because his workplace discourages him from stepping away or because everyone involved assumes that a mother’s career will be the one to bend. But when a mother bends her work around the needs of her family, she often pays for that flexibility long after the newborn stage ends.
That’s the larger issue underneath the Vances’ personal decision—and why the conversation feels especially relevant on Moms’ Equal Pay Day, which is happening this year on August 6. In 2026, mothers earn 64 cents for every dollar paid to fathers when all earners, including part-time and part-year workers, are counted. Among full-time, year-round workers, mothers earn 74 cents.
The motherhood wage gap is built over years through lost wages, interrupted careers, reduced hours, missed promotions and a labor system that still treats caregiving as something women will absorb.
What powerful fathers normalize matters
We know men don’t make decisions about parental leave in a cultural vacuum. They make them while watching what other men do—especially the men whose ambition, influence and professional success they are encouraged to emulate.
“When a high-profile father, such as Vice President J.D. Vance, forgoes leave, it can send a clear signal that caregiving should be an optional duty for men, but an expected obligation for women,” Jocelyn Frye, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families, says.
Frye has spent much of her career working on economic justice, workplace discrimination and policies affecting women and families. Before leading the National Partnership, she was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and served in the Obama White House as Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Policy and Special Projects for the First Lady.
Her point is not that every dad who continues working is consciously devaluing care. Many men want to be more involved at home but fear what stepping away will communicate at work. A benefit can exist in an employee handbook and still feel professionally dangerous to use.
When a powerful man responds to the arrival of a baby by rearranging his working schedule rather than formally leaving it, other fathers may reasonably wonder whether taking real leave would make them look less dedicated. Their employers may be absorbing the same message.
“Employers also may pick up on these same cues to create stigma and discourage leave-taking by fathers,” Frye says. That stigma matters because moms rarely receive the same freedom to treat a new baby as something that can simply be incorporated into an existing workday. The physical realities of pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding already create demands that cannot always be scheduled around. Cultural expectations then add another layer: Mothers are often assumed to be the parent who will know what the baby needs, organize the care and step away when something goes wrong.
A father who keeps working may be praised for providing stability during a major family transition. A mother who keeps working may be asked who is caring for her child. The standards are different because the caregiving expectations have always been different.
When one career stays intact, another often absorbs the disruption
The first weeks after a baby is born can determine who becomes the family’s default parent. The parent who spends more time learning the baby’s cues becomes the person most comfortable handling the baby alone. That parent often becomes the keeper of the feeding schedule, the medical information, the childcare logistics and the mental list of everything the family needs next.
Over time, it becomes easier for the other parent to remain at work because someone at home already knows how to manage everything. “When fathers take leave, mothers are better positioned to make the choices that make sense for themselves and their families,” Frye says.
That distinction—having an actual choice rather than automatically becoming the parent whose work gives way—is central to the motherhood wage gap.
In 73 percent of American households with children, every parent is in the workforce, according to the Center for American Progress. Seventy percent of women in families with children are breadwinners or co-breadwinners. Yet women remain more likely than men to stop working or move into part-time work after having a baby.
“Paid paternity leave can increase women’s labor force participation by promoting men’s involvement at home and making it easier for women to return to the workforce,” Frye says.
Research cited by the National Partnership found that every additional month of parental leave taken by a father in Sweden was associated with an increase of nearly 7 percent in the mother’s wages. The findings come from a different country with a different leave system, but they underscore the economic connection between a father’s caregiving time and a mother’s earning power.
A father’s leave may help a mother return to work sooner, remain in a full-time position or avoid becoming the only person whose schedule is expected to accommodate the family. Those decisions compound.
A few months away from work can affect the next raise, reduced hours can affect eligibility for a promotion, declining a demanding assignment because there’s no one else available for pickup can affect who is considered leadership material and smaller paychecks mean smaller retirement contributions and, eventually, lower Social Security benefits.
The motherhood penalty is often a series of seemingly practical family decisions that continue making the mother’s career less valuable each time the family has another decision to make.
The wage gap can help decide who becomes the default parent
Paternity leave is often described as a personal family decision, but it’s made inside an economy that has already placed different values on mothers’ and fathers’ paid work.
In a different-sex couple where the man earns more, it may appear financially responsible for him to remain at work while the woman takes unpaid leave or reduces her hours. But if her lower earnings reflect existing gender inequities, previous caregiving interruptions or discrimination against mothers, the wage gap begins determining who will perform more unpaid labor.
Then the cycle reinforces itself. The father remains attached to work because his salary is higher. The mother steps back because the family can more easily afford to lose her income. Stepping back then makes it harder for her earnings to catch up, making her job even more expendable during the next childcare emergency.
“Paternity leave is both an economic and equity issue because longstanding attitudes and systemic barriers prevent many fathers from caring for their loved ones,” Frye says.
It’s important to distinguish those barriers from an individual father simply refusing to help. Most men do not have access to paid parental leave. Many workers are not eligible for unpaid, job-protected leave through the Family and Medical Leave Act. Even when leave exists, families may be unable to absorb the lost income.
Men who use the leave available to them may also face professional consequences. “Many fathers that do take leave face stigma for doing so, including harassment, discrimination or negative career impacts,” Frye says. In other words, telling individual dads to step up is not enough—a man cannot meaningfully share the care if taking leave jeopardizes the income, health insurance or job his family depends on.
Still, when fathers are able to participate fully from the beginning, the benefits extend beyond the number of diapers they change during those first weeks. Research reviewed by the National Partnership has connected fathers’ paid leave with a more equitable division of household work, greater paternal involvement, improved maternal mental health and fewer postpartum health complications.
“When fathers are able to show up fully at home, it makes life easier for their partners and their entire families,” Frye says.
Offering leave is not enough if fathers are afraid to use it
A company can promote itself as family-friendly while offering a leave policy that few fathers can realistically take. The amount of time offered matters and so does how much income the policy replaces, whether the employee’s job is protected and whether workplace leaders model using the benefit themselves. “The more that men both have access to and take leave, the more normalized it becomes,” Frye says.
California offers a glimpse of how that normalization can change behavior. When the state’s paid family leave program took effect in 2004, men filed approximately 15 percent of claims to bond with a new child. They now file more than half.
The National Partnership points to three policy details that make fathers more likely to take meaningful leave.
The first is equality. Frye recommends “giving all parents the same amount of paid leave, regardless of gender, and whether it’s for a birth, adoption, or foster placement.”
Policies that classify one parent as the primary caregiver and the other as secondary can formalize the assumption that mothers will do most of the care. They can also disadvantage adoptive parents, foster parents and families that do not fit a mother-father structure.
The second is adequate pay. Frye recommends “replacing most or all of a worker’s usual wages.”
A leave policy is not truly accessible when taking it means a family cannot cover its mortgage, groceries, childcare for older children or medical expenses. Lower wage-replacement rates are particularly likely to push a higher-earning father back to work, especially when the family is already making decisions around an existing gender pay gap.
The third is security: “Protecting a worker’s job.”
Three-quarters of adults surveyed said the possibility of penalties such as retaliation or job loss is a major deterrent to men taking leave, according to research cited by the National Partnership.
These details determine whether parental leave is a genuine workplace benefit or a theoretical option employees are quietly expected to decline.
The motherhood wage gap lasts much longer than maternity leave
The financial impact of becoming a mother does not end when she returns to work.
It follows her through every year she earns less, every promotion she misses, every retirement contribution she cannot make and every professional opportunity she declines because her family’s care infrastructure still depends on her availability.
“What I most want readers to walk away with is that there are concrete steps we can take to close the motherhood wage gap while also supporting all parents and families,” Frye says.
Those steps include paid leave, affordable childcare, workplace flexibility and policies that allow fathers to become caregivers without being punished for it.
None of those solutions requires every family to divide paid and unpaid work in exactly the same way. A mother may genuinely want to take more time away. A father may hold a role that makes a complete absence particularly complicated. Families should be able to make arrangements that work for them.
But a decision is only truly personal when families have viable options from which to choose.
When paid leave is unavailable, childcare is unaffordable and fathers fear professional retaliation, mothers are not freely choosing to absorb more care. They are filling the space the system has left open.
“Every year mothers lose ground on pay is a year that compounds into fewer retirement savings, lower Social Security benefits, and diminished financial security,” Frye says.
Fathers taking parental leave will not single-handedly eliminate the motherhood wage gap, but it can interrupt the pattern at its beginning, keep one parent from becoming the automatic expert in everything related to the baby, tell employers that caregiving is not a women’s issue and it can allow mothers to recover and return to work without first proving that the family can function in their absence.
It can also challenge one of the most deeply embedded assumptions surrounding working parenthood: that a father’s career should continue uninterrupted while a mother’s career absorbs whatever the family requires.
“Policymakers must center policies that let both parents care for their loved ones without forcing one of them to unfairly sacrifice their careers.” Because when a father does not step away from paid work, the unpaid work does not disappear. Someone still does it. And far too often, she pays for it for the rest of her working life.
