Parenthood leads to large and persistent reductions in women’s employment rates and earnings. Efforts to identify the mechanisms behind child penalties have so far focused on culture and gender norms. However, less is known about the role of firms. Using US administrative linked employer-employee data, I construct firm-level child penalties for the largest employers in the US and document significant heterogeneity in child penalties across firms. Firms account for much of the variation in child penalties across the US, explaining more than seventy times the variation in child penalties than states. Exploiting variation in firm hiring expansions with an instrumental variable strategy, I show that observed firm child penalties are largely causal. A 10 percentage point improvement in firm child penalty increases the likelihood that a new mother is employed by 7.2 percentage points three years after motherhood, indicating that approximately 70% of the firm-level variation is driven by the firm itself rather than by worker sorting. Differences in workplace flexibility and firm policies could drive these effects. Improving child penalties in the lower half of firms could close the gender wage gap by approximately 30%.

When is protest effective? More specifically, when is protest successful in driving the change it desires and when does backlash limit its effectiveness? I examine the June 2020 protests that made Black Lives Matter the largest movement in U.S. history, with over 15 million people participating in protests across the country. Using unexpected rainfall to instrument for protest activity, I find evidence of lasting backlash, with an additional protest increasing fatal police encounters with Black victims by 1.044 incidents in Democratic counties. I do not find similar increases in other political contexts or amongst victims of other races. Ultimately, the effects of protest are nuanced, with backlash preventing protest from achieving its goals in certain, but not all, contexts.