Why do East German mothers work about two months more per year than West German mothers? The answer may lie in regional social norms, not incentives
Mothers in East Germany work nearly 350 hours more per year than mothers in West Germany, the equivalent of almost two months of full-time employment. This gap has persisted for three decades since reunification, despite East and West Germany now sharing the same laws, tax system, and labour market institutions. Fathers show no equivalent regional difference. This asymmetry suggests that the gap is not driven by general labour market conditions but by cultural norms specific to motherhood.
The usual economic explanations—wages, childcare costs, taxes—do play a role, but they only get us part of the way. In our recent research, we look at two cultural forces alongside the economic ones. The first is a West German stigma against working mothers, captured by the word Rabenmutter ("raven mother"), which paints employed mothers as neglectful. The second is a stigma against having children outside marriage, which tends to nudge more West German mothers into married households where they typically work fewer hours. To separate these effects, we built a model of how households make decisions, factoring in both money and social pressure.
The working-mother stigma turns out to be by far the biggest factor. It accounts for about 73% of the gap, by making employment psychologically costly for West German mothers even when it would pay well. The stigma against unmarried parenting explains just 7%, mostly by shaping who marries whom. East Germany, meanwhile, inherited a socialist-era culture of full-time working mothers, and that culture has proved surprisingly sticky, long outliving the system that created it.
When we test standard economic policies in the model, none of them come close to closing the gap. Some actually make it worse. If we equalised wages between regions, especially by pulling Western wages down toward Eastern ones, the gap would nearly double. Higher Western wages currently act as a kind of compensation for bearing the social cost of working against tradition; take that away, and West German mothers work even less. Extending joint taxation to unmarried couples or subsidising childcare boosts mothers' employment roughly equally in both regions, so the gap does not budge. The one policy that helps is giving cohabiting couples the same property rights as married ones; but even that only shrinks the gap by 8%.
Germany's East-West divide is a rare natural experiment: two cultures shaped by decades of different policies, now operating under identical rules. The takeaway is not that economic incentives do not matter, they clearly do. It is that the same incentives work differently depending on the cultural setting, and that conventional economic policy can only do so much when social norms are this deeply rooted. Closing the gap may require looking beyond taxes, wages, and subsidies, though how to actually shift entrenched attitudes about working mothers is a harder question, and one we do not yet have a good answer to.
© Bastien Chabé-Ferret, Zainab Iftikhar, and JungJae Park
Bastien Chabé-Ferret is Senior Lecturer at Middlesex University, UK, and IZA@LISER Research Fellow
Zainab Iftikhar is Professor at the University of Bonn, Germany, affiliated with ECONtribute and CRC 224, and a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)
JungJae Park is Professor of Economics at Yonsei University, South Korea
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