Shelley Correll, Stanford: Minimizing the Motherhood Penalty: What Works, What Doesn’t and Why?

The following are my notes from Correll's presentation at the HBS Gender & Work Conference, March 1 2013

Motherhood wage penalty: mothers earn less than men -- whether or not those men have children -- and less than childless women. The gender wage gap is largely due to bias against mothers.

Holding all kinds of human capital factors (e.g., experience, performance) and workplace factors (e.g., hours worked, type of job) constant, this wage penalty holds.

Four possible interventions: (1) mothers’ own efforts, (2)  policies to reduce unconscious bias, (3) family friendly legal mandates, and (4) family friendly organizational policies.

Unconventional wisdom: Family friendly legal mandates hold promise, the rest of the solutions above fall short. 

Correll, Benard & Paik, 2007: employees evaluated for management consultant position in vignette experiment. Childless women were about twice as likely to be called back or recommended for hire than women with children and they were offered $11,000 more in salary. Fathers were not disadvantaged, and were offered higher salaries than childless men.

Status-based discrimination: when someone of lower status is considered to be lower in competence and commitment than they really are.

Black mothers & white mothers experienced similar motherhood penalty, but there was a main effect for race: black employees were offered lower salaries than white employees across the board.

Solutions:

     1. Women need to work harder to make it work – put more effort into it

Vignette study (Benard & Correll, 2010), described employees in over-the-top terms, “one of the most productive employees we’ve ever hired.” Mothers were judged as equally competent as their childless peers, but were judged to be more selfish, arrogant, and dominating and less warm and likeable. They were consequently penalized in pay & opportunities.

Correll calls this “normative” discrimination – based on gendered expectations that mothers should prioritize family over paid work. Collision of two norms: ideal worker norms, gender norms; women can be seen as competent/committed OR warm/likeable, but not both.

     2. Can policies to reduce unconscious bias overcome the motherhood penalty?

Holding decision makers accountable for their decisions and establishing clear criteria for decisions reduces gender bias, but may not work for bias against mothers, as they don’t address the gender norms they’re being evaluated on.

Fixing women and fixing decision makers won’t weed out the bias; the problem lies in the norms that govern the workplace itself – need to change those norms.

     3. Can family friendly law reduce these biases?

Resistance to idea that subtle biases can be addressed via legal means; under-enforcement of employment discrimination as it is. Reason to be hopeful: law affects society not only through punitive sanctions, but also through its symbolic and expressive effects.

Law implies a social consensus that a particular conduct is wrong or not wrong, and this implied consensus influences individual moral judgments and behaviors. Laws can change the meaning of a behavior.

A law prohibiting discrimination against employees for taking leave might help.

Study (vignette): Reminding people of the Family Medical Leave Act (which guarantees 12 weeks of unpaid leave after having a child) made biases against employees who took leave (except bias that fathers are warmer than non-fathers) disappear (Albiston, Correll, Tucker & Stevens, in progress).

     4. Organizational policy as norm changer?

When a voluntary organizational policy was salient, some of the biases were eliminated but several remained. For example, fathers who took leave were now judged to be more interpersonally hostile than childless men (Albiston et al., in progress). 

Organizational policies don’t represent broad social consensus, norms outside the workplace, or “moral” judgment; the organizational policies alone (without backing from law) might be used to signal which employees are committed and which ones are not.

Organizational policies: Who should be spending significant time at work, who should be spending significant time with family; gender norms get reinforced through individual decision making

Flexibility stigma – result of gender norms, organizational policies alone can’t address (special issue in JSI edited by Joan Williams, Shelley Correll, Jennifer Glass & Jennifer Berdahl).

Changing ideal worker and gender norms: redefine what it means to be a good and productive worker [and what it means to be a good and productive man/woman]. Policies need to be designed around the principle that all workers have responsibilities outside of work, and that work can occur outside of the traditional workday and physical workplace

Kelly, Ammons, Chermack & Moen (2010), Kelly, Moen & Tranby (2011): ROWE, Best Buy Corporate Headquarters; attempts to change workplace culture from one that highly values face time to one where all employees are evaluated based on results only; main result: ROWE increased perceived schedule control and reduced work-family conflict among employees, productivity did not decrease; this kind of a policy helps to break cultural link between face time and productivity

Face time: signals both commitment to work and a masculine breadwinning role, so deep cultural change that reduces the value placed on face time can minimize the motherhood penalty.