Motherhood and Job Discrimination
Featured Guest Blogger August 3rd, 2009
Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist known for her penetrating coverage of U.S. social issues. She writes the popular “Balancing Acts” column in the Sunday Boston Globe, and her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Gastronomica, and on National Public Radio. Her latest book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, details the steep costs of our current epidemic deficits of attention while revealing the astonishing scientific discoveries that can help us rekindle our powers of focus in a world of speed and overload. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.
As a mother of two teen daughters, I’m thrilled by the positive messages they often receive about gender equality. One of their former nannies is a promising academic, finishing her PhD. Their aunt is a cardiologist. One of my best chums from college is a U.S. senator. My kids’ schoolwork is highly valued by fair, challenging teachers.
But we have far to go before my daughters will have the same opportunities open to them in the work world as boys in their generation. In particular, if they become mothers, they may experience plenty of discrimination, as I pointed out recently in one of my Balancing Acts columns.
Studies showing a “motherhood penalty” at the office and in the job market aren’t new. Mothers earn less and are seen as less committed and competent than other workers, much research shows. But one recent study stands out: a real-world experiment led by Stanford’s Shelley Correll found that mothers received half the callbacks for job interviews as equally qualified childless women.
What set this award-winning experiment apart is the fact that Correll’s team measured discrimination directly through fieldwork. Such audit studies are considered the “gold standard for considering whether discrimination is occurring,” Correll told me. In the study, researchers sent fake resumes to 638 employers over an 18-month period, then tracked the responses. In separate data, fathers were called back at a higher rate than childless men, although the differences were not significant.
The good news is that policy-makers, advocates and judges are increasingly cracking down on such caregiver discrimination. And yet, far too many people still see moms as unfit for leadership and advancement. Until we all can look at a mother and see potential, my daughters will be receiving mixed messages about their future – and we as a society will be unnecessarily turning talent away from our doorsteps.
Shelley Correll’s study sounds interesting and I don’t doubt it. I’ve been asked in the past if I have kids. I think this is illegal but never looked into it further…