ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a laboratory experiment and an audit study. The laboratory experiment evaluates the hypothesis that the ''motherhood penalty'' occurs because cultural understandings of motherhood lead evaluators to, perhaps unconsciously, expect mothers to be less competent and less committed to their jobs. Budig and England find that interruptions from work, working part-time, and decreased seniority/experience collectively explain no more than about one-third of the motherhood penalty. To distinguish between discrimination and productivity explanations, ideally one would compare the outcomes of employed mothers and nonmothers who have equal levels of workplace productivity. To understand how motherhood might function as a devalued status characteristic in workplace settings, it is helpful to broaden the conventional usage of ''performance expectations.'' The laboratory setting ensures sufficient control over factors that would interfere with tests of our hypotheses other people in the room to prime other status characteristics, telephones, or other distractions, and it allows us to collect detailed measures to fully test our argument.
