Why Women Still Can't Have It All In The U.S.

The decision to have both a child and a career is often presented as a zero sum game for women, one where it's extremely difficult to excel in one area without sacrificing the other.

A new NBER paper from researchers at Cornell and Denmark makes a strong case that having a mother that works actually benefits a child's academic performance if they live somewhere that actively supports them.

They took a look a massive dataset of academic outcomes for children in Denmark and found that the child of a woman who worked between 10-19 hours over the first four years of their child's life will have a GPA that's 2.6% higher, on average, than someone whose mother didn't work at all.

The effects are larger if you look at employment over 15 years of a child's life. Changes in income don't have much of an influence, which points to employment having a positive effect separate from any extra money.