The Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research
Featured Guest Blogger July 6th, 2009
Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth is the Director of the Center for Families at Purdue University. Please note that the views of our guest bloggers do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sloan Work and Family Research Network.
For the past nine years, we at the Center for Families at Purdue University have had the pleasure of working with my colleagues at the Boston College Center for Work & Family and our sponsor Alliance for Work-Life Progress to award the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work Family Research. Every year, an esteemed team of academics and researchers in the field review literally thousands of papers to come up with the 20 nominees for the Kanter Award, the “Best of the Best.” We seek out studies that relate to work-family issues that are not only academically rigorous, but also have direct, actionable implications for real-world organizations.
This year our winner addressed the important and provocative issue of the wage gap for mothers. In “Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty?”, authors Shelley Correll, Stephen Benard and In Paik explored the chances that mothers would be called for an interview or recommended for hire, compared to childless women, fathers, and childless men. Evaluators consistently rated mothers as less competent and less committed to paid work than nonmothers. In contrast, fathers were rated MORE positively than nonfathers. Childless women received 2.1 times as many callbacks as mothers with similar credentials. The researchers concluded that the ‘motherhood penalty’ is alive and well, even when examined with highly controlled experimental methods in both laboratory and ‘real life’ settings.
I had the honor of presenting the Kanter Award to lead author Shelley Correll of Stanford University at the Awards Breakfast at the World at Work Total Rewards Conference in Seattle. She was delighted to receive the award and conveyed such pleasure that her research is able to have an impact on professionals in the field of human resources, which she hopes will bring more attention to the bias against mothers in the hiring process.
This year, we worked closely with AWLP’s Rising Stars to create a briefer, fresher, more usable publication. Included in the Kanter Top Ten Takeaways brochure are a synopsis of the winning article for 2008 with author interview, the best actionable findings from the 20 nominated articles, and a full listing of the 20 nominated articles. We look forward to continuing to share more information about the nominated articles over the course of the year, as so many of them have interesting findings that can help guide corporate practice in the future.
Next year, we will celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award, as well as the anniversaries of our respective centers, and we look forward to beginning the review process for articles soon, to be sure that we continue to bring you the “Best of the Best” in Work Family Research, to help guide your policy and practice.
what is the best job, if you have 2 childrens (2 + 4) and your wife works outside? have you got some interesting tipps?
Nice Article ! I love getting blog information, as I like to reference them to research papers in college, well summer school now.
Congratulations Shelley, the Award papers are such a rich source of thought leadership and practical ideas.
I am very grateful that you and your team take the time to make practitioners’ lives easier by picking out the best of the best and then serving them up to us on a silver platter!
I find almost impossible to run my own limo hire company, my husband works away, l have three children, try manage them is hard enough, without cleaning the limousine, pay people to look after the children, while l work.
I too work with my wife and we job share running a business and taking care of the kids, it would be impossible for us if we didn’t pull together on this as a limousine hire business requires work at all hours and on all days of the week. Our babies are 1 and 3 so they need 24 hour care and attention and there is only me and my Mrs doing the company with the odd bit of support from family. My wife thinks she would find it practically impossible to work in the same circumstances as before, she worked full time in insurance but would never be able to work the hours, travel and be happy leaving our children so we went into business for ourselves.
Good research