November 1, 2026 — 5:00am
Australian women who emerge from IVF childless face their own perverse version of the “motherhood penalty”, losing thousands in income and declining mental health, but without the baby they desperately wanted.
An analysis of more than 121,000 women has exposed the hidden price of just trying to conceive, with implications for would-be mothers, fertility policy, workplaces and the IVF sector.
The researchers found that one in five women who started IVF with no children between 2011 and 2021 were still childless five years later.
They earned 14 per cent less, on average, in the years after they started IVF compared with their earnings two years before treatment – amounting to almost $10,000 in today’s money, the analysis of ABS data, including Census, Medicare and tax records, found.
“That’s around 40 per cent of the child penalty,” said co-author Dr Maryam Naghsh-Nejad, senior research fellow at the University of Technology Sydney’s Centre for Health Economics Research and Evaluation.
“All they did was start IVF,” she said.
The child penalty or motherhood penalty refers to the disadvantage women face once they have their first child compared to men, including career progression and income.
But the findings show that IVF carries a cost to women’s careers even when they don’t have a child, said Naghsh-Nejad, who presented the findings at a Women in Economics Network event in Sydney.
The data could not pinpoint the cause, but Naghsh-Nejad said likely explanations included women missing out on promotions and training, taking unpaid leave during IVF treatment and the mental health toll of grieving a family they desperately wanted.
The findings also highlight a fundamental flaw in calculations to determine the true cost of motherhood, given women who are childless after IVF are used as a baseline or “no child” comparison, and “that group is already paying the price of trying”, Naghsh-Nejad said.
Becoming a mother was not a question of choice for Sheree Joseph. It was a predestination. Growing up in her extended Lebanese family of grandmothers, aunties and cousins, she had imagined the chubby limbs of her future baby, their full cheeks and masses of dark hair.
In 2022, Joseph was single, in her mid-30s and attempting her third egg-freezing cycle.
Throughout the hormone injections, Joseph had been running the “rat race”, focused on financial and job stability as she planned for potentially years of IVF treatment and single motherhood.
But when her third egg stimulation attempt had failed, she resigned.
Joseph said she needed to find a new purpose, which came with its own set of financial struggles and hidden costs to her mental health.
“I started travelling a lot and doing things for myself to … justify that the thing [having a baby] didn’t happen,” she said.
“There’s probably a bit of nihilism to it. You thought you were on a path to a baby, a house and all the things you were supposed to do, and you can’t be reckless … But now, you don’t have to.”
She recalled realising, while travelling through Europe, that she could dip into her savings to extend her trip.
“The philosophy of ‘you never know what’s going to happen, and nothing is promised’ carried through,” she said.
She suspected this may partly explain the income drop after failed IVF: “People are trying to fill this gaping wound, this chasm that you can’t fill.”
Joseph wrote her memoir, Juicy, to share her experiences of creating a meaningful, sometimes chaotic life from the wreckage of infertility.
“There’s going to be moments of ‘what am I doing?’ and ‘oh my God, you’re going to run out of money’, but I think the ultimate thing that guides [me is that] it’s still on my terms, and it’s better than just being down at the bottom of the well of the dark, dark grief.”
Naghsh-Nejad said women experiencing infertility can feel like their body is failing at something innately human, “and that adds to that mental health effect”.
The share of women using mental health medication rises after IVF for all women who go through it, “but the group that remains childless by a lot more, and it persists higher,” Naghsh-Nejad said.
The rise was 3 to 5 percentage points larger than for women who had a baby, peaking two to three years after starting treatment and fading only slowly.
The researchers also found one in 13 (about 3800 women) dipped into their superannuation to pay for IVF treatment in 2024-2025, withdrawing $73.8 million in total (about $19,400 each).
Nearly all early access approvals were on the grounds of “acute or chronic mental health”.
“Each withdrawal forgoes about $147,000 at retirement, assuming a 7 per cent return over 30 years,” Naghsh-Nejad said.
The health economist said mental health support should be embedded in all fertility services and employers had an obligation to address this workplace participation issue.
A 2023 Mercer survey found only 11 per cent of employers offer paid leave for fertility treatment.
“That’s very low. And broader reproductive health leave, covering menstruation, menopause and fertility treatment, is not in the Fair Work Act at all,” Naghsh-Nejad said.
Major federal government reforms will see the fertility sector transition from self-regulation to an independent accreditation model in 2027, and the development of national standards for IVF clinics.
Dr Simon McDowell, vice president of sector’s peak body the Fertility Society of Australia and New Zealand, said informing patients of what to expect at the outset was key to successfully navigating and preparing for the challenges of IVF.
”Fairness, equity, and transparency around access, costs and the rules governing IVF [are] needed,” he said, urging the federal government to adopt the recommendations of the sector’s 10-year fertility road map.
The findings were outlined in a discussion paper co-authored by Naghsh-Nejad and Dr Fabio Martinenghi, a research fellow at the University of Newcastle.
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Source: The Sydney Morning Herald · Kate Aubusson
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