Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty?

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. 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. Motherhood affects perceptions of commitment because contradictory schemas govern conceptions of "family devotion" and "work devotion". The motherhood interaction is significant and positive in the model predicting the required test score, while the main effects of gender of applicant and parental status are insignificant, showing that participants require mothers to score higher on a test of management ability than other applicants before considering them for a job.