Self-Employment in Mothers’ Careers After First Birth: A Comparison of South Korea and the United States

Upon parenthood, women face pressure to reorganize their paid work and careers. In this process, self-employment can offer a distinct option, with a different set of risks and benefits than wage work. Yet research on mothers’ employment trajectories rarely examines self-employment as a distinct option. This paper examines how self-employment fits into mothers’ careers after their first birth and how this pattern differs between two institutional contexts: South Korea and the United States. Using the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I track mothers’ employment history from their first birth through the following ten years. Descriptive and sequence analyses show that one in five mothers experiences self-employment at least once, but the way they leverage it differs by institutional context. In South Korea, self-employment more often follows nonemployment, is primarily full-time, and occurs within trajectories leading back to paid work. In the United States, mothers more often enter self-employment from wage work, while part-time self-employment appears intermittently in wage-centered trajectories. Thus, self-employment occupies different positions across these two contexts, where mothers’ counterfactual career options vary. As technology shifts, the potential importance of diverse forms of self-employment, including contract-based gig work, may increase, raising the need for future research to examine how self-employment fits into one’s career.