The Motherhood Penalty: What It Is, and Why We’re Over It

Beyond that, women face considerable discrimination in the hiring process and shoulder more housework at home, even when they earn more and work longer hours than their male partners.

This is the “motherhood penalty”. Fathers, meanwhile, experience the opposite effect—it’s known as the “fatherhood bonus” or "fatherhood premium" with a positive impact on men's earnings.  So, what’s going on?

The idea that working mothers are (or should be) less committed to their work than their peers is hardly a new one.

In the United States, it was legal to fire (or refuse to hire) a woman on the grounds that she was married until 1964, and a married woman’s right to apply for credit in her own name wasn’t protected by law until 1974. For much of history, the predominant cultural narrative has been that a woman’s place is in the home, especially once she’s married and responsible for the lion’s share of childcare and domestic duties.

Even though legislation has shifted over the past 50 or so years to allow women financial freedoms and legal protection against overt discrimination, less overt forms of discrimination have continued. 

How do you flip a script that has been the norm for...ever? 

 

7 Important Terms for the Conversation About Motherhood and Work

Before we get into this (sort of infuriating) article, let's explore some important terms around working motherhood. 

The Motherhood Penalty + The Motherhood Wage Penalty

Research shows that the wage gap between mothers and women without children is wider than the gender wage gap between men and women without children.

Women's earnings can expect to drop with every child with every child they have, due to a complex cocktail of bias, plus structural and practical barriers to success as a working mother that does not exist for fathers.

Flexibility Penalty

Statistically, employees who worked mainly or entirely from home until the pandemic were less than half as likely to be promoted than other employees, and were around 38 percent less likely, on average, to receive bonuses.

They’re also more likely to work in the evenings and do unpaid overtime—not to mention the fact that remote workers are more likely to be in a job that’s below their pay grade or skill level, as there aren’t as many flexible jobs as traditional jobs.

How this might change in a post-pandemic world is yet to be seen, but it raises some red flags, as mothers are more likely to work part-time jobs, remote, and flexible hours in an attempt to fit their work around their family life. 

Internalized Bias, or “Unentitled Mindset”

This term, recently given the alternate title of "unentitled mindset", hinges on a narrative that someone has absorbed and internalized that may cloud their ability to advocate for themselves.

Some common examples include:

• “I’m lucky to still have a job at all"
• "I can’t ask for a raise as well as flexible hours so that I can pick up my kid from school a few days a week” 
• “I’m lucky my partner helps with the kids and housework at all—I can’t ask for more, even though I feel overwhelmed”

This type of bias negatively affects someone’s ability to negotiate on their own behalf, or advocate for their own needs, and is especially at play in regards to salary negotiations for women—The Female Lead’s research suggests that women struggle with an unentitled mindset more frequently than their male counterparts, which goes some way to explaining the gender pay gap.

Our beliefs (both conscious and unconscious) about the world shape our perception of others and therefore our behavior. Expectation bias is at play when we allow our expectations of what will happen or what someone will be like to shape and color our perception of reality.

For example, if we assume working mothers are less committed than their peers, we’ll expect a certain outcome and therefore tend to notice every time they need to leave the office early rather than the quality of the work they do or the times they put in extra work.

If we hold negative expectations of mothers, we might also avoid hiring or promoting them, or assume they can’t handle (or aren’t interested in) certain types of career-progressing projects and opportunities.

We might have the same bias toward childless women—we think they are more committed or less distracted during work time. Other expectation bias could be around educated women or married women.

Zero Drag Worker

The Second Shift

The Mental Load or "Invisible Labor" 

The Myth That Mothers Aren't Dedicated to All of Their Work + Their Work Effort Decreases 

Eve Rodsky, time equality activist and author of Fair Play, believes the motherhood penalty is a vital key to gender equality, and that more people need to be made aware of it.

“Did you know you took an economic risk when you became a mother? A majority of a woman’s pay gap is the motherhood penalty,” Rodsky points out, “the missed opportunities for promotions, prestigious assignments, pay increases and bonuses due to the perception that women are not as committed to their work.”

The issue of discrimination against mothers has been the center of heated discussion lately thanks to comments by talk show host Larry Elder who ran (and lost) for a gubernatorial recall election in California in 2021. 

As Media Matters reported, Elder has made various claims in the past to the effect that working mothers aren’t dedicated, reliable, or fully committed to work. Elder supports discrimination against pregnant women and working mothers; that’s bad enough as it is.

It gets worse when you consider that this line of thought plays out in reality as discrimination against any woman who hasn’t definitively decided and widely shared that she doesn’t want to have children, ever. (So, the large majority of women in the workforce, then.)

If mothers are a bad business investment, that means that hiring any woman who might go on to have a child—or, shock horror, children—at some point in the future is a risk not worth taking.

Better pass overall female candidates in favor of safer male candidates for any important roles, by that thinking; at least, any female candidates who haven’t yet passed childbearing age or are unwilling to sign a contract saying that they won’t ever commit the atrocity of daring to procreate.

But to what extent is this attitude an outlier? Do many people these days hold similar views, and how, if at all, does this impact working mothers?  

8 Ways the Motherhood Penalty Works Against Moms 

As wild as it is that people like Elder hold these opinions and are willing to declare them on record while running for office, perhaps the scarier thing is that evidence suggests his opinion is more common than you might think.

So common, in fact, that experts have given the phenomenon a name: the motherhood penalty. 

Previous studies like Bright Horizons’ 2018 Modern Family Index study, for example, found that 41 percent of employed Americans believe working mothers are less devoted to their work than their peers, and 38 percent judge them for needing a more flexible schedule.

In her book Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, neuroscientist Cordelia Fine shares various studies that suggest that cultural stereotypes about mothers have very real consequences for their careers.

1. Mother Job Applicants Received Fewer Callbacks + Lower Salary Offers 

In one study, sociologist Shelley Correll and her colleagues found that fictional mother applicants who had identical resumes and work experience to their fictional non-mother applicant counterparts were perceived as having less competence (by roughly 10 percent), less committed to the workplace (by around 15 percent), and—the real kicker—as Fine puts it, “worthy of $11,000 less salary.”

Overall, “Mothers received only half as many call-backs as their identically qualified childless counterparts.” According to Fine, the researchers also found that, “While parenthood served as no disadvantage at all to men, there was evidence of a substantial ‘motherhood penalty’.” 

2. Anecdotes are Everywhere

Meanwhile, many of us have anecdotal evidence to back these trends up: my talented dentist friend told me that her grandmother asked her if she’d keep working when she got married in her mid-twenties.

During a job interview for a national magazine at a highly prestigious company as a mother of one in my late twenties, I was asked how I would handle childcare if I got the job (a question that, funnily enough, never once came up for my husband when he was job hunting around the same time—it also happens to be illegal).

I also once sat through a conversation between two Boomer generation fathers who were discussing (at a time when my husband was unemployed and I was working full-time as our family’s sole breadwinner) how important it is for children to spend the majority of their time with their mothers until they go to school, and the potential trauma and psychological damage they will most likely experience if their mother has a job. 

3. Unconscious Bias is Real + Rampant

Usually, this bias manifests as a series of stereotypes that we hold unconsciously.

They slip out in the form of illegal interview questions, hiring and promotion decisions, inappropriate comments that plant seeds of self-doubt in a mother’s mind, and assumptions within couples such as “Her salary needs to cover the childcare costs, otherwise she may as well not be working.”

(I’ve caught myself thinking this way about my own income in the past, and have heard many mother friends do the same.)

For every female employee who makes headlines for taking their boss to court for discrimination when they became a mother, there are countless other women who are forced to accept the status quo or don’t feel they have a right to expect things to be different.

4. A Reliable "Return to Work" Path for Mothers Remains Unpaved

Women At Work, an in-depth study of working women released this month by The Female Lead, reports that “While overall bias against women was, in most workplaces, on the ebb [in 2021], expectation bias towards women returning from maternity leave persisted and impacted negatively on career progression.”

The various barriers women face when returning to work after having children, the report argues, is one of the key identifiable reasons for the gender pay gap. It's the reason that women’s careers tend to plateau—and even backslide—at their mid-career point.

By contrast, the average male career trajectory tends to keep climbing upwards, tracking with seniority. 

While offering women maternity leave and flexibility after having kids is clearly an important factor in the fight for gender equality, the report suggests that it’s not enough on its own. As I’ve become aware through personal experience, flexible working as a mother can be a double-edged sword.

“Women who took advantage of job flexibility, or who had taken a career break when their children were very young, were hit by a long term penalty, whereby it could take up to 6 years to return to the level they had been at before the career break,” the Women At Work report shares. “It was only in firms where flexibility was the norm, and where very senior men also worked flexibly, that there was no flexibility penalty.”

5. Anti-Mom Bias aka "You're Not Trying Hard Enough"

As Katherine Goldstein, Creator and Host of The Double Shift Podcast, told me, “There is deep-seated anti-mom bias throughout American culture and the labor market, and the fact that it's still acceptable to some to display it so openly showcases what moms are up against. 

As for moms not being ‘committed’ to their work, it, unfortunately, seems to be an American cultural trait to put mothers in completely impossible situations with little to no support and then talk about not ‘succeeding’ as a personal failure. I doubt Larry Elder could survive a week doing what so many working moms have done for the last 18 months.”

Goldstein has a point; Elder’s remarks have a particularly nasty sting to them in the wake of the global pandemic, during which we saw record numbers of women worldwide decreasing their labor force participation to provide emergency childcare for their families and be the primary caregivers.

One report suggests that one in four women are considering leaving the workforce or downshifting their careers because of the pandemic, compared to one in five men. 

Globally, women’s job losses due to Covid-19 are 1.8 times greater than men’s. These sobering figures are prompting some to refer to this economic downturn as the “she-cession”.

6. The "Zero-Drag" Employee Problem 

As Goldstein points out, no man would be able to do what we expect working mothers to do, namely conform to the post-industrial revolution “zero drag” model of the ideal committed employee, whose first and ultimate priority is work and the company’s bottom line, at the same time as being there for their families and doing the majority of the domestic work.

The Women At Work project suggests that major inequalities are still arising from “a firm’s tendency to ‘own’ the employee as a person”.

It also suggests that “regular discussions between HR and other employees to explore what [is] needed to be both a contributor to the firm and have some kind of work/life balance” to help address inequality, creating a healthier workplace and culture that benefits not just mothers, but all employees.

7. Heavy is the Load at Home, Too

Data suggests that the motherhood penalty problem has multiple facets to it, and needs to be addressed both at work and at home. Even before the pandemic, women were reportedly doing roughly three-quarters of the unpaid domestic labor, globally.

This doesn’t just apply to stay-at-home mothers and women who don’t have paid jobs. In Delusions of Gender, Fine shares, “In families with children in which both spouses work full-time, women do about twice as much child care and housework as men.”

Shockingly, the data also shows that “The more she earns, the more housework she does,” to the point that she still does most of the housework even when she’s employed and he isn’t. 

In one particularly depressing study that Fine highlights, female faculty at the University of California reported working 51 hours a week on their jobs, and another 51 hours on housework and child care, which makes for a 102-hour week, with more than 14 busy hours per day.

In comparison, faculty fathers reported working 32 hours a week on chores and child care.

As Fine writes, “This substantially lighter load not only enables them to put in an extra five hours a week at work, but to also enjoy a spare two hours a day,” a great luxury of free personal time compared to the 26 minutes a day that over-stretched faculty mothers have to themselves.

8. The Vicious Cycle of The Motherhood Penalty

There’s clearly something of a vicious cycle at play when it comes to the motherhood penalty.

Firstly, there’s the cultural narrative that mothers are constantly absorbing about themselves, coupled with the fact that they may indeed have less experience than their peers because they’re given fewer opportunities to gain leadership experience.

Then there’s the fact that mothers may potentially have more career gaps on their resumes, and be generally stretched more thin because of carrying the heavier load at home.

All of these factors mean that working mothers will generally be less likely to put themselves forward for promotions, be more reticent to negotiate for a salary raise and benefits, and be more likely to give up on their careers and opt-out of work all together. 

Why We Need to Trust Working Mothers

Joeli Brearley founded the organization Pregnant Then Screwed to campaign against maternity discrimination in the UK after her employer fired her when she told them she was pregnant.

''We know from research that a large proportion of employers consider women to be distracted and less committed to their jobs once they dare to procreate,” Brearley told me. 

1. Motherhood is Basically Elite Training for Business Leadership

“The reality is that raising children is like an elite training programme for business leadership,” says Brearley. “You learn patience, emotional intelligence, tolerance, how to give and receive feedback, how to motivate others, how to increase your productivity and how to multitask like a ninja.

The problem isn’t mothers, the problem is that the labour market isn’t set up to accommodate those with caring responsibilities. The companies that have made the effort to create a family-friendly workplace have seen their productivity and profit soar.”

2. By Eliminating The Motherhood Penalty, We Create a Leadership Pipeline

As McKinsey reports, companies with more women executives tend to outperform those with fewer women in senior positions.

Given that mothers make up nearly a third of the female workforce in America, we can’t afford to ignore the motherhood penalty.

There’s also plenty of reason to believe that slowing down and re-thinking what good work looks like, along with the accommodations we need to implement in order to help working mothers to thrive will benefit fathers and non-parents, too. 

3. Mothers Bring Out the Best in Employees

Meanwhile, the same study from Bright Horizons in 2018 that reported 41 percent of employed Americans believe mothers are less committed to their work than their peers also reported that 89 percent of employed Americans agree that working mothers in leadership roles bring out the best in employees, citing better listening and time-management skills as some of the traits they’ve observed. 

What to make of this apparent contradiction? I think it just goes to show that we hold conflicting ideas about working mothers.

On one level, we can recognize their strengths—but we still so often hold (a usually unconscious) negative bias. 

The Cultural Shift Working Mothers Need

Imagine what most working fathers have going on behind the scenes that makes it possible for them to show up as a fully-committed and engaged members of a team.

Most likely this includes: 

For most working fathers, all of this support goes on behind-the-scenes without anyone questioning it—made possible by mothers. This is what working mothers need to thrive, too—and yet for many of us, it feels like way too much to ask. 

What working mothers really need is for our work cultures to become more flexible, embracing better work-life boundaries, and working more family-friendly hours.

Specifically, we need men to start working more flexibly. We need men to take more career breaks so that these things are normalized rather than being gendered. Most importantly, rather than requiring mothers to fit into the existing work culture, we need the existing work culture to change.

This is, in fact, one of the major takeaways from The Female’s Lead’s Women At Work project: “The solution to internalised bias lies in changing the environment rather than the women.”

For too long now, we’ve been trying to change women; many of us are excited to see what would happen if the culture changed, instead.