Female child penalty is strongly related to the work history of the maternal grandparents. Come again.

Oh Lord, here we go again. Allegedly some evidence ...

CHILDREN AND GENDER INEQUALITY: EVIDENCE FROM DENMARK (Pdf)

ABSTRACT 

Despite  considerable  gender  convergence  over  time,  substantial  gender  inequality  persists  in  all countries.  Using  Danish administrative  data  from  1980-2013  and  an  event  study  approach,  we show  that  most  of  the  remaining  gender  inequality  in  earnings  is  due  to  children.  The  arrival  of children  creates  a  gender  gap  in  earnings  of  around  20%  in  the  long  run,  driven  in  roughly  equal proportions  by  labor  force  participation,  hours  of  work,  and  wage  rates.  Underlying  these  “child penalties”,  we  find  clear  dynamic  impacts  on  occupation,  promotion  to  manager,  sector,  and  the family  friendliness  of  the  firm  for  women  relative  to  men.  Based  on  a  dynamic  decomposition framework,  we  show  that  the  fraction  of  gender  inequality  caused  by  child  penalties  has  increased dramatically  over  time,  from  about  40%  in  1980  to  about  80%in  2013.  As  a  possible  explanation for  the  persistence  of  child  penalties,  we  show  that  they  are  transmitted  through  generations,  from parents  to  daughters  (but  not  sons), consistent  with  an  influence  of  childhood  environment  in  the formation of women’s preferences over family and career.

I have a problem right away with the abstract when it says "child penalties". In sports you get a penalty for acting or engaging outside of the rules of the game. Life has no such rules. You are expected to stay inside the law, apart from that you are pretty free. You may take a dump on the desk of your boss any day. Chances are, it won't be many of those days. You may talk rude to other people, there is no penalty doing so. You will perhaps dine in lonely places more often.

Seriously, a woman makes a conscious (hopefully) choice when bearing a child. So there is no penalty. These are life choices made out of free will. You are playing the game.

Under Conclusions it says among others:

Third, we have provided evidence in favor of environmental inuences in the formation of preferences over family vs career. In particular, we have shown that the female child penalty is strongly related to the work history of the maternal grandparents: women who grow up in traditional families with a male breadwinner and a female homemaker incur larger child penalties when they themselves become mothers. 

Not quit sure, but it sounds a little contrived to me. I still get the most out of Bourdieu and certainly so in terms of an entertaining lingo so typical of the French intelligencia.

It is no doubt in the encounter with the 'objective' expectations' inscribed, mostly in the implicit state, in the positions offered to women by the still very strongly sexually differentiated division of labour that the so-called 'feminine' dispositions inculcated by the family and the whole social order are able to be fulfilled or even blossom, and, in this very process, to be rewarded, thereby helping to reinforce the fundamental sexual dichotomy, both in the jobs, which seem to call for submissiveness and the need for security, and in their occupants, who are identified with positions in which, enchanted or alienated, they both find themselves and lose themselves. The essentially social logic of what is called 'vocation' has the effect of producing these kinds of harmonious encounters between dispositions and positions in which the victims of symbolic domination can felicitously (in both senses) perform the subaltern or subordinate tasks that are assigned to their virtues of submission, gentleness, docility, devotion and self-denial.

(Masculine Domination)

via Bradford DeLong

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

Pride and Prejudice