NEWS: Motherhood is About Sacrifices

CULTURE: Motherhood is About Sacrifices

Here's some cheerful news to start your weekend with: if you're a mom, you're going to earn less than if you aren't.

And no, it isn't because moms "choose" to work less, or take time off, or any of the lovely excuses people like to offer to imply that it's Your Own Fault. It's because employers, shown two women's resumes that are exactly the same, will actively discriminate against the one that implies that the applicant is a mom--even when being a mom actually means you've got more managerial experience on your resume than the competition:

Less money, higher expenses (e.g., childcare--not to mention clothes and books and food and toys for the kids). No wonder when families are looking at who's going to cut back on work hours, it often ends up being the mom--because, after all, she earns less money. And then, of course, she's applying for her next job with a gap in her resume, and on it goes.

Enjoy the kiddos this weekend. Try not to punch your boss on Monday.

Bitch_PhD, who quit her professorial job to become a free lance writer and primary parent in part because her BS-holding husband can earn two or three times what she can as a professor, isn't pissed off about this kind of thing at all. No. Really. Okay, maybe just a little.

I have no doubt that this is true.

But if a small business owner - say, like, oh... ME, maybe - notices over the years that the sprog-free employees are in a position to s-t-r-e-t-c-h more for the cause, that they seem more devoted to their careers, that they are less trouble (sometimes at critical moments) and just seem to produce more over the long haul than the parents on the payroll, what should said business owner do?

As socially conscious and aware as I like to think I am, I also have to think about the vitality of the business that sustains me and the other people on the payroll. We're in competition with other businesses for a share of the market, and sometimes little changes - like hiring someone who isn't trying to juggle too many responsibilities - can produce the kind of dividends that help keep us afloat. (Please don't quote me statistics, I've collected plenty of my own from year to year experiences.) I know, it sucks, but so it goes.

Should mothers be forced to lie about parenthood in order to gain that edge on a resume or interview?

I think not, but how to address such a misconceived idea that a mother is less suitable?

A simple yet well thought out study, kudos to raising the issue.

I never list anything that indicates I am a parent on my resume for this very reason. If you say that your a mom (esp if you are a single mom) they automatically assume that you will have childcare issues, be late, call off or whatever. Screw that I work just as hard and am just as good at my job as a non-mom...maybe even better because moms (most) know how to budget, divide time, multi-task and keep a cool head under pressure. It's Jacked for sure.

Seriously? From your experiences, you FEEL that it is true? Where have I heard that before?

That's the whole freaking point of collecting and analyzing data, to eliminate the bias that results from limited individual experiences of the world. Do you end all of your arguments with, "It's just common sense?" You've collected your own data? Share it with us please.

So I browsed the actual article. You might have to be on a college campus server to read it, but you can find it here.

The data was not collected from the real world. It is from an experiment in which undergraduates evaluated resumes after being told about the job and that their young person's opinions would be considered in the company's hiring decisions.

Being a mother hurt you in regards to starting salary, perceived commitment, hirability, and promotability. Being a father, as compared to being a non-father male, actually helped.

It's a little more complicated than all of that, but I don't have time to really get into it because I quit sociology and I'm supposed to be writing lesson plans for 6th graders right now.

*Thanks Bitch_PhD, this is the first time I've wished I was still in the sociology department since I left it a year ago....la dee da...back to work...*

Kudos to you, very well spoken, I was very very lucky to get the job I have and what's funny is I was just chillin there like any other day with my newborn (2 weeks old at the time) and my best friend brought her boss over and said, "She needs a job" surprisingly he sat down right in front of me with a clip board and interviewed me with my infant in my arms. I was in total shock, I had spit up on my shirt, ripped jeans, I was just there for coffee and bam, I left with a job. So yeah not all places are like that and I get paid almost 8 bucks an hour now....so right on.

Nice, asshole. I am a single FATHER and a but kicking construction manager who has had a hard time getting work because some folks think that because I have to tend to my kid sometimes that I can't do my job.
Guess what; I make buckets of money for my current employer (who has three children) and serve our clients interests without fail while some of my former coworkers who are childless/single are still showing up late with hangovers or calling in sick to go play golf. I don't play golf, but I do help coach Little League. I even leave early to do it (and don't get paid for time I am not on the job) and when I am back at work I do everything in my power to beat the money out of competition that thinks like you do.
The best part is that We do beat the crap out of the corporate modeled management companies. My devotion to my work is second only to my devotion to my family, as it should be. Anyone who builds their workforce hiring practices on the assumption that parents are less desireable than non-parents has a very short sightline on what productivity really means. You must be one of those 30 day managers. Do you have a 5 year plan? do you even know what I am talking about?
Enjoy your sometimes not so smart, experienced or effective puppet employees and drop dead,
M.

Yr the kind of boss who uses "working for the greater good" and "taking one for the team" as code for "unpaid overtime", aren't you?

What a frightening sentence, "to eliminate the bias that results from limited individual experiences of the world." Is that the kind of brave new world we should build? One where I'm not allowed to act based on MY experiences of the world?

Am I to turn over all my decision-making to... who? A University? A government entity? A church? Certainly THEY'VE never been known to lie or cheat or introduce THEIR own biases into the results they publish.

No, I don't end every argument with "it's just common sense." But I hope you understand that in MY city, in THIS year, under CURRENT conditions in MY marketplace, *I* should be the one who makes decisions about what makes sense for MY business and what doesn't.

I'm not coming down on all parents, I've worked with plenty of good ones. And I've worked with plenty of jerk-off singles that I had to get rid of for reasons that obviously had nothing to do with kids. I feel sorry for people like Laurel Anne above and others like her who are excellent empoyees but are "guilty by association" and who have to go so far as to lie on their resumes about their status.

But when you own your own business and your very survival (and perhaps that of your employees) is dependent on maintaining it's health, believe me, you'll be relying on YOUR own instincts in your practices, too.

I love the enormous mental leap you've made here. To presume that I must be Wal-Mart because I didn't post the proper PC response. No, Cigarette, I'm a believer in the golden rule. My employees are paid well and compensated fairly. When business is especially good, we divvy up the bonuses. When business is poor, it's ME who takes it in the shorts, not them - they're under contract at a given rate.

I don't make millions in stock options. I don't have any golden parachutes. The person who usually "takes one for the team" around here is ME.

Wow, classy response what with the name-calling, etc.

No, I'm not a 30-day manager (don't even know what that is.) Don't have a 5-year plan, either. So, nope, I guess I'm not sure what you're talking about.

"Puppet employees?" Wow, you know nothing about me, my business, or my employees and then you say stuff like that. Obviously, you've got some anger bottled up about this issue and I've touched a raw nerve.

We all understand that you will act on your view of the world. What has that to do with policy-making?

I agree with SockPuppet. While you certainly should act on your hunches and personal experience if you feel that's best, that's not the point here. Eliminating bias created by the noise of the human brain is not building a brave new world. It's trying to figure out what's really going on beyond the crap that we think we see. I can go out and ask a bunch of mothers how they feel about their pay relative to a woman with no kids, and vice-versa, and they can tell me what they think. And none of it will be reliable as a general indicator, for precisely the reasons you state - your market, your area, that year, that day. I think you're mixing a scientific interpretation with what you think the government will tell you to do. If they'll indeed tell you to do anything.

Is your husband making 2-3 times as much because you are a parent? Or is it because the workplace places a higher value on his skill set than yours?

I'd really like to see the resumes. I'd like to know if the inclusion of three letters is the cause of such a pay disparity, or if a picture of having many other duties was painted (PTA Officer, not just member).

To me this seems like a symptom of a cultural problem of gender inequality in child rearing (percieved and actual). Same thing with Shelly Correll's efforts to get more women female professors in science/math/engineering departments at Cornell linked from salon article There aren't equal numbers of male/female professors because there arn't equal numbers in the field. If equality is the goal, how about looking into why there are fewer women entering the field instead of trying to make things look better twelve steps better.

Instead of complaining about how badly it itches, why don't we get rid of the fleas?

Just a general comment. I really enjoy Bitch_PhD's work.

Every boss says this. Somtimes they believe it. Sometimes its true.
Yes, I spent several years having to make payroll.
Ne'r again will an employer/employee shall I be. S'just not for me.

I'd love to see the same study duplicated to see if there's an actively parenting father bias (i.e. reverse the gender of the applicants but leave the control and PTA membership info the same).

Indeed, that's exactly as it should be.

But then I guess if you didn't have a family your devotion to your work would be second to none. I can see how an employer would find that attractive.

(Emphasis added)

I would definitely like to read the actual study and read the actual resumes. The more important issue is the methodology used. As you state, "The data was not collected from the real world." In and of itself that is a huge qualification on the conclusions drawn by the study. Based on your comment, the actual people reviewing the resumes were undergrads at the university.

Since I can't read the study but do see that the article talks about years of experience and a CV, I'm going to conclude the job in question wasn't something the vast majority of the undergrads would have a body of experience in a similar managerial position to draw on in making their recommendations.

Based on these facts, the statement:

The researchers didn't show the resumes to employers. They showed the resumes to undergraduate students. While the study could make conclusions on what those students might do if they were immediately promoted to a managerial role and asked to staff the subject position, the study cannot make a scientifically supportable conclusion about what actual managers would likely do in the real world. The experimental sample set diverges to far from the actual set of actors that it makes the conclusion unsupportable.

Thanks for linking that. I was going to call Bitch_PhD on leaving it absent before I realised that not everyone has access to scientific articles. As it stands, this article is a quaternary source (from a Salon.com article citing a Cornell news feed). It is a good article and an important topic, but it is a bit 'far' from the source material.

Plus One. I wonder if she has ever met Inga Muscio.

Maybe the employers just really had a thing against the PTA.

Whenever I think of the PTA, I think of the crazy lady in Donnie Darko who doubted people's commitment to Sparkle Motion.

Don't have children.

Fixed.

What does his statement have to do with policy making?