More women are the breadwinners in Canadian families — but less so if they have kids

More and more Canadian women are the breadwinners in their families — but there's a catch.

Women's contributions to family income have increased over the last 30 years, coinciding with their growth in the labour market, notes a recent report from the Vanier Institute of the Family.

And Statistics Canada data analyzed by the independent national think-tank shows that women provide more than 50 per cent of total family income in a growing share of husband-wife families, compared to one-third in 2022, and one-quarter in 2000. However, that's less likely to be true if those women have children. And even worse if they have more than one, with that proportion dropping by three to four percentage points per additional child.

Seeing the numbers in black and white starkly demonstrates what's called the "motherhood penalty," said Allison Venditti, a human resources expert in Toronto and founder of Moms at Work, Canada's largest advocacy group for working mothers.

"It's so deep and engrained, this belief that mothers belong in the home and should be caring for their children, and that's really reflected in how they're compensated at work," Venditti told CBC News.

"You're being penalized over and over and over again, every time you have another child, and at the same time, society is screaming, 'I wonder why women aren't having more children?'"

The Vanier Institute's "Family Work" report highlighted that women earned the majority of their family's income in 32.8 per cent of gender-different couple families in 2022, up from 25.9 per cent in 2000. (Statistics Canada refers to these as husband-wife families.)

But having children under age 18 changes the numbers.

Women earned the majority of the couple's employment income in 36.8 per cent of couples without children under age 18, compared with 29.5 per cent of those with children.

Broken down further by the number of children, in 2022, the woman earned the majority of a couple's employment income in 32.1 per cent of couples with one child, 29.3 per cent of those with two children, and in 25 per cent with three or more children.

And despite the overall trend of women's contributions to family income increasing, the institute said, "women continue to earn less than men on average, and are more likely to live with a lower income."

This is evident in a 2024 report by TD Economics that showed the average family income was nine per cent lower in families where women were the breadwinners, and that those families had fewer financial assets — about $30,000 less than families with male breadwinners, on average.

"Men are able to step forward because women step backward.... They are boosting their ability to do work," Claudia Goldin, a professor at Harvard University, told USA Today in October 2023.

Last year, Goldin was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for advancing the understanding of the gender gap in the labour market. Among her many contributions from studying 200 years of labour market data, Goldin found that the "motherhood penalty" was one of the reasons women earn less than men, and particularly, why mothers earn less than fathers.