05/05/2026 - 12:45 - Doyen 22 

Auguste Debroise

(Unamur)

will give a presentation on

The social image cost of motherhood. Evidence from the movie industry

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the child penalty in the movie industry. Using career data from IMDb for nearly 5,000 actors and actresses who appeared in top-grossing films between 1990 and 2022, combined with a database of approximately 30 million newspaper articles, we document how motherhood shapes both professional trajectories and public representation. We find a substantial and persistent child penalty for actresses. Ten years after their first birth, women experience a 15–20 percentage point decline in the number and quality of roles, as well as a 20 percentage point drop in total box office exposure. Notably, this penalty extends beyond on-screen work: off-screen occupations such as directing and producing are even more severely affected, suggesting that the penalty is not driven solely by audience preferences. On the media side, we document a striking divergence: controlling for career activity, mothers receive only half the newspaper mentions of fathers a decade after the birth of their first child. When they do appear in the press, coverage increasingly frames them in family-related terms rather than professional ones. Crucially, exploiting variation in gender norms across US states, we find that the drop in media coverage is significantly larger in more conservative states, holding maternal behavior constant. This provides suggestive causal evidence that the disappearance of mothers from public discourse is not solely driven by changes in their own behavior, but also reflects how society's perception of women shifts upon motherhood.

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