This dissertation is comprised of three essays that examine how gender norms and historical, social, and local labor market factors shape the persistent gender gaps in labor market outcomes, with a particular focus on child penalties. Across all chapters, I emphasize how both past and present exposures—to policies, peers, and broader societal conditions—can have long-lasting impacts on labor force behavior and gender inequality. In Chapter 1, I examine how intra-household comparative advantage and local labor market dynamics influence the persistence and heterogeneity of child penalties in the United States. Using a combination of gender-specific labor market shocks and pseudo-event studies around childbirth between 1980 and 2010, I document that child penalties decline more significantly in areas where the gender wage gap has closed more rapidly. I further explore mechanisms and find evidence of increased female education, delayed childbirth, and evolving gender attitudes. Chapter 2, joint with Henrik Kleven and Eleonora Patacchini, investigates how social exposure during adolescence affects the labor market consequences of parenthood. Specifically, we study whether the work behavior of peers' parents during adolescence influences the magnitude of child penalties in adulthood. Leveraging variation in exposure to working mothers and fathers across school cohorts, we find that greater exposure to working mothers substantially reduces the employment penalty from having children, while greater exposure to working fathers increases it. These results suggest that adolescent social environments are instrumental in shaping long-term gender norms and labor market outcomes. In Chapter 3, joint with Natasha Jha, Revathy Suryanarayana and Meredith Welch, we examine the long-term intergenerational effects of women's increased labor force participation during World War II. Using variation in wartime factory conversions across U.S. commuting zones in a difference-in-differences framework, we find that higher wartime exposure is associated with increased educational attainment but reduced early-career labor force participation among Baby Boomer women. These findings highlight the nuanced and complex legacy of large-scale historical labor shocks on subsequent generations of women.