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For decades, research has warned of a “motherhood penalty” in the workplace: women who have children are sometimes viewed as less committed and less competent, diminishing their chances of promotions or raises.
However, a new major study found the script may be outdated — and that parenthood may actually help some employees.
A paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found no evidence of a motherhood penalty in a series of large-scale experiments. It was authored by Christopher D. Petsko, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at UNC Chapel Hill; Rebecca Ponce de Leon, an assistant professor at Columbia Business School; and Ashleigh Shelby Rosette, professor of leadership at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
Instead, the researchers found what they called a “parenthood boost” — a tendency for people to evaluate parents more favorably than their childfree peers, regardless of gender.
“I was very surprised, yes,” Petsko told Business Insider about the findings. “The motherhood penalty has been such a foundational finding in the behavioral sciences that seeing it not replicate was striking.”
“That said, society has changed a lot over the last couple of decades, and it’s not unusual for phenomena that were first documented 20 years ago to look different today.”
No penalty, but a boost for some
In a series of four large-scale experiments with 4,742 participants, Petsko’s team revisited the classic motherhood penalty studies with a new lens: racial identity.
They manipulated race, gender, and parental status in fictional employee profiles and asked participants to rate these employees’ competence, warmth, and suitability for promotion.
Not only did the researchers find no evidence of a penalty for mothers, they concluded that the opposite was true.
Parents were consistently rated more positively than non-parents, regardless of gender.
However, there was a catch. While both Black and white parents received a boost, the increase was significantly larger for white employees.
When the researchers combined data from all four experiments, they found that white parents were perceived as more competent and warmer and were less likely to be discriminated against than their childless peers.
Black parents, by contrast, didn’t enjoy the same bump. In some cases, they saw no change in evaluation at all when parenthood was introduced.
“Truth be told, we’re not sure,” Petsko said when asked why white parents seemed to benefit more.
“Something that seems plausible — at least to me — is that the societal prescription to ‘raise a family’ might be something that people hold more strongly for members of dominant racial groups than for members of non-dominant racial groups,” he said.
“And if that’s the case, then it would make sense for people in the US to more strongly reward parenthood when they see it in white employees than when they see it in Black employees.”
However, Petsko said his comments were purely “speculation” and that there was no data to help determine the causes of this racial bias.
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Not over yet
Petsko said he did not want companies to conclude that the findings meant that motherhood penalties were now “a thing of the past.”
“Although motherhood penalties didn’t emerge in our experiments — which assessed single-shot impressions of men versus women in the workplace — they do still seem to emerge in other kinds of studies,” he said, citing longitudinal studies of men’s versus women’s wages after they become parents.
Instead, Petsko said parenthood itself may trigger biased evaluations.
“There truly may be a systematic tendency to think of someone as more competent at their jobs, and even as more deserving of promotion, simply because we’ve learned that they have children,” he said.
“And if that bias is real — and not just real, but directed more strongly toward white employees than toward Black employees — then companies ought to know about it. Companies can’t create equitable work environments if they aren’t aware of the biases that underpin their decision-making.”
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