Looking Back: Wage Penalty for Motherhood
Dear friends of women in science,
I recently ran across an interesting paper from 2007 by Shelley Correll et al, Am J Sociology volume 112, pages 1297 -1339 The title is, "Getting a Job: Is there a Motherhood Penalty?" These days, Shelley Correll is at Stanford with the Clayman Institute while in 2007, she was at Cornell. She and her colleagues noted that survey data had uncovered a substantial wage penalty for mothers, about 5% per child, and they hoped, with their study, to clarify the causes of this discrepancy. The methodology was comparison of CVs of possible job candidates, where the name was masculine or feminine but otherwise the information remained the same. In their study, they found actual employers did indeed evaluate the males higher and think they should be offered more money.
In Table 1, for example, we see the females without children were recommended to receive and average of 148,000 and the mothers 137,000 while they recommended males with no children receive 144,000 and males with children 150,000, on average. Results were significant with P values less than 0.05.
Another line of data in the table was about recommendation for management. Females with children were recommended at .691, females without at .862. Males with children were recommended for management at .936 and without children, at .851 Clearly the category being under-valued here is women with children (remember the same CV materials were used for all categories). Males' compensation and management potential went up with children, while females' went down.
As the authors put it, the employers penalized mothers "on a host of measures, including perceived competence and recommended starting salary. Men were not penalized for, and sometimes benefitted from, being a parent." According to the authors, the motherhood role is not a comfortable fit with the employee role, as actual employers visualize them.
Are you aware of this study? Does it fit with what you've see about hiring and promoting women? Of course, with the Yahoo CEO having been hired away from Google recently while pregnant, we can find counter-examples!
cheers,
Laura
Hi Helen,
Yes, it's great to hear you give yourself some thinking time on these issues and try to discuss them out loud instead of just making assumptions. Women are quite individual in how they decide, and sometimes they change over time so making that choice once needs not to set a strategy for handling them in concrete. But a lot of managers won't discuss these concerns repeatedly, but just do it once and then act as if it cannot change.
Women are embedded in the same culture and subject to the same malign influences that whisper "choose the man first" sadly, and several recent studies show we need to keep worrying about how best to handle these issues fairly too. I'm glad you are facing it and dealing with it!
cheers,
Laura
I've seen it plenty of times. Men are assumed to be the bread-winner and thus they need more for their families.
Managers also assume that women will be bearing the majority of sick child and vacation care. This is often but not always true, and it's hard to say as a manager myself that I don't think about such issues before giving someone more responsibility that also requires more travel and longer days.
Fortunately I've learned to identify those feelings and make sure I write down the considerations I have, walk away, and then come back to look at them. That helps with my own bias, and I'm also a mom, so it's not just men doing this!
The bias is alive and well. How to counteract it in my experience has been to address it head-on during discussions around job expectations. I make sure to tell folks that I have back-up childcare and am fully commited to delivering on my goals. It makes a difference...
Helen
Dear Laura,
I interviewed while pregnant, but didn't show. Luckily, people didn't ask so I didn't tell. I feel like I got a fair deal but someone hired the year after me, who was already mother of a two-year-old, does seem to have a smaller lab and less startup than she needs. I don't know about her salary.
FRP
Dear Laura,
I think women who take negotiation seminars and learn how to ask for what they need up front can do better in these situations. I was really scared to speak up but I learned (actually practiced) saying I need certain equipment and grad students, etc, so when the time came, I could do it comfortably. So I seem to have a comparable salary and dept support with other men in my hiring group. It could be different if I didn't negotiate, I'm sure.
Karen
Hi Female Bio Prof,
Yes, for sure it's more complicated. I guess soc sci researchers tend to isolate one variable and test it and that's what they did, but it can't capture the whole situation.
cheers,
Laura
Hi Laura,
In my experience, women in general get the penalties they found for just women with children. And then the chilly atmosphere is added on. Just more complex than this in my experience.
FBP
