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."
Hi Alex. It depends a bit what you mean by motherhood penalty. The term covers a few different things. The first meaning in my mind is the average earnings difference between mothers and fathers. But it also refers to lowered chances of promotions, reduced workplace opportunities, and the like. On top of that, it sometimes refers to biased worker evaluations!
I did debate whether it was the right title, but I kept it for two reasons. One is that the new research questions the motherhood penalty in the sense of biased evaluations. The other is that it questions the idea that earnings gaps and the like are due to biased evaluations, and thus can reasonably be labelled motherhood *penalties* (as opposed to lower wages to due causes other than bias).
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.
Some people have a negative attitude toward motherhood, sure. But the motherhood penalty is specifically about workplace outcomes - e.g., pay rates, promotion rates, workplace evaluations.
I knew a busy owner who found that parents made better group leaders. This was in white collar engineering work so the team leads were basically all men.
Interesting. He might be right - but I'm always a bit nervous about those kinds of generalizations. People get stuff like that wrong all the time: They think group X is higher or lower in trait Y, but then careful research finds no such relationship. I think a better approach is to look at individual traits and track record, rather than using heuristics like "parents are better in role X."
No, it’s an experiment where achievement is held constant and sex varied across conditions, so as to isolate the effect of perceiver bias on people’s evaluations.
Parenthood and raising children is likely the best path to human maturity. Learning to work as a team, shifting the focus from self to others, delaying one's own gratification for the good of others, realizing that one's actions impact others and shifting as needed. And so much more. Businesses are wise to prefer parents!
That sounds plausible and might be true. But I'm not sure if there's any research showing that having kids increases maturity in a way that affects workplace behavior, so I don't think we should be too confident that it does.
As for businesses being wise to prefer parents, I think you might mean in hiring and promotion. But this study looked at workplace evaluations, and found that exactly the same person was evaluated more positively when described as a parent than when described as childless. Given that it was the same person being evaluated, that can only be unjustified bias, right?
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
Hi Alex. It depends a bit what you mean by motherhood penalty. The term covers a few different things. The first meaning in my mind is the average earnings difference between mothers and fathers. But it also refers to lowered chances of promotions, reduced workplace opportunities, and the like. On top of that, it sometimes refers to biased worker evaluations!
I did debate whether it was the right title, but I kept it for two reasons. One is that the new research questions the motherhood penalty in the sense of biased evaluations. The other is that it questions the idea that earnings gaps and the like are due to biased evaluations, and thus can reasonably be labelled motherhood *penalties* (as opposed to lower wages to due causes other than bias).
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.
Some people have a negative attitude toward motherhood, sure. But the motherhood penalty is specifically about workplace outcomes - e.g., pay rates, promotion rates, workplace evaluations.
I knew a busy owner who found that parents made better group leaders. This was in white collar engineering work so the team leads were basically all men.
Interesting. He might be right - but I'm always a bit nervous about those kinds of generalizations. People get stuff like that wrong all the time: They think group X is higher or lower in trait Y, but then careful research finds no such relationship. I think a better approach is to look at individual traits and track record, rather than using heuristics like "parents are better in role X."
Is this a study of actual workers measured against a gold standard of their actual achievement?
No, it’s an experiment where achievement is held constant and sex varied across conditions, so as to isolate the effect of perceiver bias on people’s evaluations.
Parenthood and raising children is likely the best path to human maturity. Learning to work as a team, shifting the focus from self to others, delaying one's own gratification for the good of others, realizing that one's actions impact others and shifting as needed. And so much more. Businesses are wise to prefer parents!
That sounds plausible and might be true. But I'm not sure if there's any research showing that having kids increases maturity in a way that affects workplace behavior, so I don't think we should be too confident that it does.
As for businesses being wise to prefer parents, I think you might mean in hiring and promotion. But this study looked at workplace evaluations, and found that exactly the same person was evaluated more positively when described as a parent than when described as childless. Given that it was the same person being evaluated, that can only be unjustified bias, right?
There is evidence that maturity decreased postponing motherhood. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39217228/
Interesting!