The Mommy Penalty

Societal Biases Thrive Long After The Reasons Behind Them Die

The floodgates have opened on sexual harassment claims. Yet the harsh treatment of working mothers has been ignored. While working women focus on shattering the glass ceiling and equal pay for equal work, working mothers face a “maternal wall.”[1]  

Prejudice against working mothers or as it has been called the Motherhood Penalty is the “strongest form of workplace gender discrimination” on record adding up to hundreds of thousands of lost dollars for women. The pay gap iswiderbetween working mothers and non-working mothers than it is between working men and women. 

And it’s getting worse. Women continue to pay a penalty for choosing to be mothers measured both in diminished wages as well as in their treatment as lesser contributors not suitable for promotion. Motherhood is one of the single strongest predictors of both bankruptcy and poverty in the US.

Working mothers suffer from lower perceived competence and commitment, higher professional expectations, lower likelihood of hiring and promotion, and lower recommended salaries. Over a lifetime, mothers with one child earn 28 percent less than childless women.[2]  For each additional child, women lose another 3 percent. The sacrifice in dollars is dramatic. Women without children are paid a median of $3,850 a month; mothers earn about $1,278 less each month.

Successful women may find their competency questioned once they become pregnant, take maternity leave, or adopt flexible work schedules. Suddenly, their performance evaluations tank and their political support disappears. Managers and co-workers simply believe mothers are lesser employees, reading identical behavior differently depending on whether a woman has children. In short, the societal norms perpetuated by male domination go into overdrive when a working woman becomes pregnant or has a baby.

A childless woman who is out of the office is presumed to be on business. An absent mother is prioritizing her children or juggling child care. (This is the same phenomenon as when a man leaves work to attend his child’s soccer game, he is applauded as a good dad, while if a woman leaves work for that same game, she is presumed to be insufficiently committed to her job and maybe she isn’t at the game at all but breast feeding a younger child or she is at the game in her role as the designated soccer mom to hand out the juice boxes and snacks at breaks.) When not in the office, the childless woman’s availability is assumed, even after hours, while mothers are seen as decidedly off the clock. Mothers’ tardiness is punished more harshly. Women without children are given the benefit of the doubt because their commitment to work is presumed, not discounted.

And the “no win” attitudes that all women in the work force face are heightened: Women, especially pregnant women and new mothers, are supposed to be bathed in the glow of hormonal “mommyness”—emotional, empathetic, and nonassertive. If these same women remain tough, forceful and focused on their work, they are viewed as insufficiently maternal, cold and unlikeable.

Parenthood is seen as a “life choice” and the mother must accept the consequences. She has chosen motherhood over her career.  As a result, 58 percent of millennial moms say being a working mom makes it harder to get ahead at work. [3]A survey of Harvard Business School alumni found that 37 percent of millennials who aren’t yet moms expect to interrupt their careers for parenting.[4] Increasingly American women are “opting out” of parenthood in favor of their work. Twenty-four percent of American women aged 40 to 44 in the 2006-2010 period are childless, and this number is higher for women college graduates.

Research confirms these biases. In a classic study, sociologist Shelley Correll and her colleagues asked individuals to judge hypothetical job applicants in order to evaluate the hypothesis that the “motherhood penalty” on wages and evaluations of workplace performance and suitability occurs, at least partially, because cultural understandings of the motherhood role exist in tension with the cultural understandings of the “ideal worker” role.[5]The results: Mothers were judged as significantly less competent and committed than childless women, held to harsher performance and punctuality standards, and needed a significantly higher score on the management exam than non-mothers before being considered hirable. The recommended starting salary for mothers was $11,000 (7.4%) less than that offered childless women; mothers were rated as significantly less promotable and were less likely to be recommended for management. In terms of hiring decisions, 84% of childless women versus 47% of the mothers were recommended for hire.

Alongside these findings, Correll and her colleagues reported a test of these results in real life. They sent 1,276 pairs of fictitious résumés to 638 actual employers. The resumes and cover letter showed each pair was identically qualified, the only difference was that one was a mother and the other was childless. The test found that non-mothers were more than twice as likely as mothers to receive a call for a job interview.

Two years later, Correll posed the question: What happens when mothers definitively prove their competence and commitment?[6]  That study found 

two equally troubling sets of results. First, mothers faced discrimination in labor-market-type evaluations even when they provided indisputable evidence that they were competent and committed to paid work. Second, the evaluators discriminated against highly successful mothers by viewing them as less warm, less likable, and more interpersonally hostile than similarly situated childless women.[7]

How Did This Happen?

Thousands of years ago, before breast pumps and grocery stores, women were forced to bear the brunt of childrearing and homemaking, leaving men free to seize the reigns of leadership in all roles outside the home. But, those days are over. These days women are just as able to lead outside the home as their male counterparts.

Cultural assumptions aside, here is the reality: 71 percent of mothers with children at home work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and women are the sole or primary breadwinner in 40 percent of households with children, according to data from the Pew Research Center.

Yet society continues to act as if male dominance is the natural order of things—especially when it comes to the work place. While thousands of years of cultural evolution have radically changed humans and the gender roles they play, imbalanced gender roles continue to be reinforced through pervasive attitudes about the “proper” role of women and particularly 

lJoan C. Williams, The Maternal Wall, Harvard Business Review, October 2004

[2]William Rutledge, Alice Zulkarnain, Sara Ellen Kong,  How Much Does Motherhood Cost Women in Social Security Benefits,   Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. WP#2017-14

[3]Kim Parker, “Despite Progress, Women Still Bear the Heavier Load Than Men in Balancing Work and Family, Pew Research Center, March 10, 2015.

[4]Life & Leadership After HBS, Harvard Business School, May 2015.

[5]Shelley J.Correll ,Stephan Benard ,In Paik, Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty?, Harvard Kennedy School, Women and Public Policy Program, March 2007.

[6]Shelley J. Correll, Stephen Benard, In Paik, Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty? American Journal of  Sociology, Vol.112, Number 5, March 2007..

[7]Stephen Bernard, Shelley J. Correll, Normative Discrimination and the Motherhood Penalty, Sage Journal, September 22,2010.