How Parenthood Can Shape Workplace Evaluations

Research has long suggested that motherhood can hurt women’s wages and career opportunities. But a new study by Professor Ashleigh Shelby Rosette found no evidence of a “motherhood penalty.” Rather, it found that being a parent could help you —man or woman — in the workplace.

“We found that this long-held established presumption of a motherhood penalty no longer held up in these experimental studies,” said Rosette, the James L. Vincent Professor of Leadership at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

In a paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Rosette and co-authors* tested whether people still discriminated against mothers at work by judging them as less competent than comparable women without children, a penalty that prior research had not consistently observed for fathers.

To their surprise, participants not only showed no signs of motherhood discrimination as previously measured but also revealed a general parenthood boost, applied equally to men and women.

“Our findings showed that parents were perceived as warmer, experienced less discrimination, and often were thought to be more competent,” Rosette said.

However, when they included race to the experiments, they found that Black working parents (men and women) received smaller parental advantages.

“The workplace benefits associated with parenthood may vary by race,” she said.

First impressions of a fictional associate consultant

Several past studies have indicated that working moms lose out in two ways: they are perceived as less competent and are penalized in their career advancement.

Since most of this research dates back several years, Rosette and co-authors wanted to investigate whether it still held up among contemporary Americans.

“Much has changed over the last 20 years,” she said.

In a first study, adult participants reported their impressions of a fictional “associate consultant.” 

The results surprised the authors, Rosette said.

The researchers found no evidence that women were penalized more than men. They actually found that participants rated parents (regardless of gender) as warmer, more competent and more deserving of a promotion than non-parents.

The researchers then moved beyond gender to examine whether race might affect these evaluations. But in their first two studies, they found similar results: race didn’t seem to affect people’s evaluations of working parents.

“These first-impression experiments showed that parenthood appears to convey a universal evaluative advantage rather than a penalty, indifferent to race,” Rosette said. 

When race impacts the parenthood boost

Rosette and colleagues explored whether these findings would hold up across a larger number of participants. This time, they studied a group of 1,604 U.S. adults—double the size of the first study— and asked them the same questions about their impressions of the associate consultant.

The experiment produced another unexpected result.

While gender still didn’t matter in boosting parent evaluations, race did this time.

White parents continued to receive a clear parenthood boost — higher perceived warmth, and stronger promotion recommendations. Black parents, on the other hand, received no significant boost in warmth, competence, nor stronger recommendations compared with Black non-parents.

“Perceptions of White employees became more favorable when they were described as parents, but the same boost did not occur for Black employees,” Rosette said.

“This result was unexpected. Based on the results of our first two studies, we expected the parenthood effect not to differ by race,” she said.

Considering a candidate for a promotion

To dig deeper, the researchers adapted a different study design from previous research. This time, they asked nearly 1,200 participants to evaluate a candidate’s suitability for the job of Assistant VP of Financial Affairs at a company. The participants received an information sheet about an employee being considered for promotion to that position. The employee was described in terms of professional background, performance, gender, parental status, and race.

Again, they found that women and men were not held to different standards when they were described as parents in the workplace. But race, as in the previous study, minimized the parental boost. 

Different situations, different lenses

Rosette acknowledges that these results might look different when measured in real-world workplace settings. Still, the findings may suggest that previous assumptions about discrimination and motherhood penalty are less relevant than they were 20 years ago, she said. 

One reason may be because of a change in methods, she said. Standards for experimental research have evolved quite a bit over the past two decades, allowing scholars to test these effects with much more precision.

Another factor that may have led to these new findings is the evolution of societal attitudes toward women — Rosette mentioned recent influential studies supporting the idea that women are now seen as competent as men, if not more so.

And a similar trajectory might explain an evolved perception of parenthood, she added.

However, the researchers also acknowledge that the motherhood penalty could still potentially emerge in other settings. Some stereotypes, Rosette said, may be salient in one social setting but muted in another.

“This work captures what are essentially ‘single-shot’ impressions,” she said. “Participants evaluate someone based on a limited profile and in this context, we do not find any evidence to support the motherhood penalty. Now, that does not mean that the motherhood penalty has disappeared. It still may emerge in more dynamic and consequential workplace settings.”

When rewards could become another form of discrimination

This research might suggest that job applicants should disclose their parental status to increase their chances of being hired and promoted. But Rosette emphasizes that these are only experimental results, and job seekers should consider whether to disclose their status.

“I wouldn’t tell someone to put ‘parent’ on their vitae because of these findings,” she said. “But I also wouldn’t want people to assume that they have to hide that part of their lives. Our findings suggest that sometimes when others know that you’re a mom or a dad, you may be viewed more positive than negative.”

For leaders, the evidence of a parental boost may suggest they should view bias as a twofold concept, Rosette said.

“Oftentimes we are very focused on how we might discriminate against people, and not as much on how we discriminate in favor of people,” she said. “Organizations often train managers to try to recognize if they are penalizing categories of people because of their identity. But it may be just as important to ask whether they are bestowing an advantage because of a positive stereotype or expectation.”

* Co-authors:

Christopher D. Petsko, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Rebecca Ponce de Leon, Columbia University