Job Tasks, Leadership, and the Gender Gap after Parenthood

We use linked US survey and administrative data to provide new evidence on the job tasks performed by women and men around parenthood. We develop an occupation-level measure of leadership task intensity. Leadership has an increasing and concave age profile and is predictive of earnings, even after including detailed controls. Women and men shift in parallel toward leadership-intensive occupations prior to parenthood, but mothers fall behind fathers after having children. These findings highlight leadership tasks as a source of earnings growth over the life cycle and suggest that differential promotion to leadership positions is a mechanism underlying the gender earnings gap.