Abstract: In settings where marriage and childbearing are tightly linked, marriage is a prerequisite for having children. Women take on more home care duties after marriage, and their labor market outcomes often begin to shift even before a first birth. If changes in women's work are put down to childbearing alone—overlooking the gendered redivision of labor that marriage itself brings—the total family formation penalty will be seriously underestimated. Using CFPS data, this paper adopts a joint event study design built around first marriage and first childbirth. It estimates recent marriage, childbearing, and family penalties on women's work for those first married between 2010 and 2022, uses Oaxaca decomposition methods to gauge how much these penalties add to the gender gap in work, and asks whether they arise from a gendered split of home labor rooted in social norms.

Key findings are as follows. First, Chinese women face a 17.4% marriage penalty and a 16.2% child penalty, yielding a total family penalty of 33.6%; both contribute almost equally to women's work losses, yet the child penalty is larger in the short run. Second, standard single-event studies typically leave out the marriage penalty and thus underrate the harm family formation inflicts on women's work. Third, the family penalty makes up 74.1% of the 2020 gender gap in paid work, and the child penalty's share of this gap has risen over time. Fourth, these penalties persist even when women have no less schooling than men. Long-held gender norms keep driving how home roles are split, which is very likely the main reason women end up with a larger family penalty.

The paper adds to the field as follows. First, by turning seven waves of CFPS cross-sections into panel data via personal IDs and a joint event study design, it pins down both the marriage and child penalty for Chinese women. Second, for cases with no pre-marriage data, it uses pseudo-event study matching on sex, age, year, schooling, and urban/rural status (or province) to enlarge the sample and run robustness checks. Third, mechanism analysis further shows the old gendered split of home labor is the main path through which both penalties operate. No matter how spouses' pre-marriage edges stack up, women's housework time rises sharply after marriage versus men's, strongly hinting that old social norms may lie at the root of gender gaps in China today.

These empirical results point to several clear and actionable policy steps. First, formally recognizing domestic services and offering subsidies for their use can transform gendered unpaid care into paid services that families can readily purchase. Second, introducing a dad-only, non-transferable paid parental leave would send a strong and clear signal that care is a joint responsibility, thereby helping to break the deeply entrenched image of women as sole carers. Third, establishing an inclusive child care system based on full-day care with extended-hour add-ons can ease family care burdens and enable both parents to participate more fully in paid employment.

Keywords: Low Fertility, Marriage Penalty, Child Penalty, Event Study Method

摘要： 在婚姻和生育高度绑定的社会中，婚姻仍是生育的前提。如果仅关注生育惩罚而忽视婚姻本身带来的性别分工重构，则容易低估女性因组建家庭而产生的总体就业损失。为此，本文采用中国家庭追踪调查(CFPS)数据，基于双事件研究法，识别了2010~2022年中国女性的婚姻惩罚效应和生育惩罚效应。研究发现，中国女性在初婚和初育后均呈现出显著的就业率下降趋势，而男性则不然，在初婚和初育事件发生后的7年内，女性家庭惩罚平均效应达到33.6%，其中婚姻惩罚和生育惩罚分别为17.4%和16.2%；然而在前两年内，生育惩罚效应要大于婚姻惩罚效应；两者共同作用可解释2020年74.1%的性别就业率差距。此外，在女性受教育程度不低于男性的家庭中，婚姻惩罚和生育惩罚也依然存在，说明由传统性别规范主导的家庭分工模式仍是婚育惩罚的主因。由此可见，生育支持政策不能仅依靠经济激励，还应注重性别规范的重塑。

关键词: 低生育率, 婚姻惩罚, 生育惩罚, 事件研究法