Fessing up to being a mom can backfire on job seekers
A marketing consultant was on the phone last month with an executive recruiter when the interviewer began asking her the questions that moms dread most: Does she have kids? How many? How old?
Taken aback, she reluctantly responded, feeling trapped. Refuse to answer, and she might appear hostile. Reveal her family status - and she feared she would hurt her credibility.
“Once you declare yourself a mother, the whole perception shifts,’’ says Alison, a Connecticut mother of two who is seeking a marketing job at a nonprofit organization. She spoke semi-anonymously, fearing further discrimination.
She’s right. Some employers discriminate against mothers as job candidates, offering them just half the number of callbacks for interviews that childless women with comparable credentials get, according to a study of the “motherhood penalty’’ that women with children face at the office and in the job market.
Behind the poor treatment is the stereotype that mothers are less effective and committed to their jobs, studies show.
“We found substantial discrimination when mothers applied for a job,’’ says Shelley Correll, a Stanford University sociologist who led the study - the first to test for motherhood bias in a real-world setting. “With mothers, there seems to be no compunction against being blatantly discriminatory.’’
The news, of course, is grim for mothers, who increasingly sequence in and out of the workforce to support their families and further their careers. “Opting in’’ has been a hot topic in recent years, with job fairs and business school programs proliferating to teach moms how to land jobs. But steep unemployment, plus discrimination, makes their prospects difficult.
Still, there’s good news, too. The government and many courts are taking action on rising complaints involving discrimination against caregivers, who are protected by a range of federal laws. For instance, a new mother who is reassigned to undesirable work because her boss thinks she’s less serious about her career is protected against sex-based stereotyping under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 bans discrimination against working caregivers based on their association with a person with a disability. (For more information see www.worklifelaw.org .)
In 2007, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued guidelines that detailed how such laws protect caregivers. And in May, the EEOC followed up with best practices to help employers avoid falling foul of the law.
Managers shouldn’t assume that working mothers can’t keep up at work or shy from granting them promotions, and interviewers - including recruiters - shouldn’t ask about family status, the federal agency said.
“Do not ask questions about the applicant’s or employee’s children, plans to start a family, pregnancy, or other caregiving-related issues during interviews or performance reviews,’’ advised the EEOC in May. Asking about such issues, especially of female candidates only, can be considered evidence of bias.
When Laurie Chadwick applied for a promotion in 2006 at her employer, Anthem Health Plans of Maine Inc., she was grilled about how she disciplines her four young children. Later, she was told that she didn’t get the new job because a boss thought she had too much on her plate, including her children and night classes.
The company disputes allegations it discriminated against Chadwick. In March, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston threw out a lower court ruling in favor of Anthem, paving the way for a jury trial.
“It was very demoralizing to be told that my promotion was denied because of my kids, even though I had been very loyal to my job and earned the promotion based on my performance,’’ Chadwick told Maine lawmakers in April in testimony supporting a state bill banning caregiver discrimination. The bill passed the state House but died in the Senate last month.
“I have four kids, and I feel that this happens to women, not men,’’ Chadwick’s attorney, David Webbert, said. “I think it’s a pretty pervasive problem.’’
Not only do mothers earn 5 percent less per child than other comparable workers, but they struggle with a host of biases on the job, studies show. Pregnant women and mothers are seen as less dependable, less authoritative, and less committed to their jobs, research by Correll and others show.
Correll’s hiring research, published in 2007, marked the first “audit study’’ - or real-world test for discrimination - of the motherhood penalty. The technique has been used extensively in research on racial discrimination. Last month, the study won the prestigious Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for work-life research, named for a pioneering Harvard Business School professor.
Over an 18-month period, Correll and her team sent equally qualified fake resumes, half from moms and half from childless women, to employers in answer to 638 job ads. Some candidates were listed as elementary school parent teacher association, or PTA, officers, while others were described as officers in a college alumni association.
Mothers received half as many callbacks for interviews as childless women. At the same time, separate data involving men revealed that fathers were slightly preferred over childless male candidates, perhaps because fathers automatically are viewed as breadwinners, the researchers surmised.
What can we all do about the motherhood penalty?
To preserve their careers, moms need survival strategies, according to Correll and coauthor Stephen Benard, an assistant professor at Indiana University. When leaving the office for a client meeting, tell co-workers - so they don’t assume you’re off with your kids, they suggest. Don’t wait for promotions - ask for them.
But the researchers rightly stress that coping with bias doesn’t change the system. To effect real change, we all need to act, because the motherhood penalty affects us all, causing wasted talent, family pain, and lost opportunities for diversity.
Working moms are often the most productive and innovative additions to any workplace. In a down economy, can we afford to squander such people power?
Maggie Jackson is the author of “Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age.’’ She can be reached at www.maggie-jackson.com. 