Is the Motherhood Penalty a Myth?
New research suggests parenthood may actually boost - rather than harm - workplace evaluations
The motherhood penalty refers to the supposed workplace disadvantages faced by women after they have children: lower wages, fewer opportunities, and a reduced chance of getting promoted. These disadvantages are thought to stem from biased perceptions that mothers are less competent and committed.
Several studies have reported such a bias, finding that the same person is rated less favorably when described as a mother than when described as childfree. Now, however, a large multi-study paper has thrown this conclusion into question. Across four experiments covering nearly 5,000 participants, Christopher Petsko and colleagues found no evidence at all of a motherhood penalty in worker evaluations. On the contrary, they uncovered a consistent parenthood boost: a tendency for people to evaluate parents, both men and women, more positively than their unencumbered counterparts.
As the graph below shows, parents of both sexes were rated as more competent, warmer, and more deserving of promotion than non-parents. While the effects weren’t enormous, they were consistent and statistically significant.
Note that, although there was no motherhood penalty, Petsko and colleagues did find evidence of another bias. Specifically, they found that White parents received larger parenthood boosts than Black parents. And of course, one could also argue that they documented a generalized bias against employees who don’t have children.
It’s not completely clear how to interpret the absence of a motherhood penalty. One possibility is that there used to be a motherhood penalty, but it’s recently evaporated. Another, though, is that the earlier research - which had notably smaller sample sizes - simply got it wrong, and that mothers weren’t actually evaluated less favorably. Either way, the landscape of workplace biases seems to be very different than we usually assume. We need to update the map!
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Related Reading From the Archive
Dissecting the Gender Pay Gap
Did you know that women earn as much as men these days? It’s true; they do - until, that is, they become parents. After that, however, the sexes diverge, and women start earning less than men. This phenomenon is known as the child penalty.
At the risk of sounding pedantic, this doesn't suggest that the motherhood penalty itself is a myth, just that it isn't caused by biased worker evaluations. But was this ever really a leading hypothesis of the cause? Time taken out of careers to have children and need for flexible/less-demanding work thereafter are the primary drivers afaik.
E.g. one meta-analysis finds that:
"While the gaps associated with the total number of children are mostly explained by the loss of mothers' human capital during child-related career breaks, the gaps associated with one child are predominantly driven by mothers' choice of jobs and occupations that pay less."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0049089X20300144
I would add that a certain amount of bias exists in favor of a motherhood penalty. The feminist cause if rife with bias against motherhood, as it is against marriage and families. Any scientific study can be shaped by strong negative feelings toward men, families, and children. Feminists have long ago ceased to be about rectifying wrongs in favor of reverse bias against biology.