Specifically, women are expected to fare better in the formal sector, where legal and customary protections may allow them to earn higher wages and sustain them during motherhood. Finally, bo decomposition is complemented by a non-parametric alternative decomposition developed by Nopo (2008). This allows for a better explanation of motherhood wage differentials, since it also shows how much of the gap calculated is accounted for by the outcomes of mothers and non-mothers outside the common support. The glass ceiling hypothesis concerns the discrimination that women and minorities in more educated groups often face in trying to move up the hierarchy of an organization, especially when they have more children, by comparison with men and with childless women. The quantile regression (qr) results vary substantively across the conditional wage distribution; the poorest 10% of the informal women sample are the ones who suffer the largest motherhood wage penalties.