Beyond the Child Penalty: Parenthood, Partnership, and Career Advancement in Academia

Gender differences in academic careers are often attributed to parenthood, yet relatively little is known about how family structure shapes career advancement. Using Swedish register data covering all associate professors between 1996 and 2020, this paper studies how young children and household structure shape promotion to full professor. The results show that gender differences in promotion among parents are not primarily associated with having young children per se, but with the combination of a young child and a co-resident partner. Women with a young child and a partner have an annual promotion probability approximately 21 percent lower than comparable men. Over an eight-year period, this compounds into a roughly 30 percent lower probability of promotion. The findings further reveal that among parents, both women and men partnered with an academic have higher promotion probabilities than those partnered with non-academics. Yet despite these advantages, among parents with academic partners and young children, women experience the largest cumulative promotion gap relative to men, suggesting that career coordination within dual-academic households remains an important factor in shaping academic careers. Promotion probabilities also differ substantially across academic fields, with medicine displaying particularly large gender gaps irrespective of partnership status. Together, the findings contribute to research on academic careers by showing that household structure, rather than parenthood alone, is central to understanding gender differences in promotion within universities. More broadly, the findings highlight the importance of considering household context when studying gender inequality in academic careers.