Sabbaticals Are Costly for Women : Pay: Those who take a break from work--to raise children, for example--never earn as much as those who stay on an uninterrupted career path, a study says.

Taking a break from work to raise children or to pursue other non-career interests does permanent damage to a woman’s earning power, two economists have concluded in a new study.

Seven years out of the work force “costs you 10 years of wages” over the course of a woman’s career, said Joyce P. Jacobsen, co-author of the study and an assistant professor of economics at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn.

The study suggested that employers consider women who have interrupted their careers less dedicated than other workers and more likely to leave their jobs again. As a result, the study said, employers appear to be hiring these women “for less important, lower-paying jobs, where their expected future departure will matter less.”

Unlike most other research on women’s pay, the study by Jacobsen and co-author Laurence M. Levin, an assistant professor of economics at Santa Clara University, focused on the long-term effects of taking a temporary leave. The women in the study who had taken time off from work, had been back at work, on average, 13 years since the last break.

Women who have been back at work less than one year after a career break make 33% less than their counterparts with comparable experience who worked continuously, the study found.

Jacobsen and Levin said the pay gap between women who take breaks and those who don’t narrows over time. Women whose last career break was more than 20 years before make 5% to 7% less.

Some experts on women’s pay issues cautioned against reading too much into the study. In time, they contended, the pay gap between women who take career breaks and those who don’t will fade, along with the gap between men and women.

“The labor market’s treatment of women is fluid. It’s changing now. It doesn’t mean that things will be this way 10 or 15 years from now,” said Elaine Sorensen, author of a 1991 book titled “Exploring the Reasons Behind the Narrowing Gender Gap in Earnings.”

Felice Schwartz, president of the nonprofit research group Catalyst, said the dwindling number of young workers entering the labor force is making women who have taken career breaks more valuable assets for employers. Previously, she said, many employers “didn’t want women and looked for reasons to keep them down.”

That era, Schwartz said, is ending. The thinking among enlightened employers, she said, is that if a talented working woman “is going to take time off or cut back (on her working hours), we want to make sure we get her back” when she resumes full-time work.

Yet Jacobsen contended that the pay gap between break takers and non-break takers may grow wider. She said fewer women are taking breaks, so the ones who do “stand out more, so it might send out a stronger signal to employers.”

Jacobsen and Levin’s research tracked 2,426 women who ranged in age from 30 to 64 when the three-year study began in 1983. It compared the wages of those who worked continuously since their last year of school to those who had taken at least one break of six months or more.

Women in the study who worked continuously tended to be better educated and younger than their break-taking counterparts, but mathematical adjustments were made to filter out pay gaps stemming from differences in education, age or years of job experience.

The researchers did not investigate whether break takers also tend to do other things that make them less valuable in the eyes of employers. For example, it did not explore whether such women also tend to avoid working weekends or overtime to take care of children.