Getting a job: Is there a motherhood penalty?

By S. Benard, Shelley J. Correll, In-Sun Paik. 2005

729 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Survey research finds that mothers suffer a substantial wage penalty, although the causal mechanism producing it remains elusive. The authors employed a laboratory experiment to evaluate the hypothesis that status-based discrimination plays an important role and an audit study of actual employers to assess its real-world implications. In both studies, participants evaluated application materials for a pair of same-gender equally qualified job candidates who differed on parental status. The laboratory experiment found that mothers were penalized on a host of measures, including perceived competence and recommended starting salary. Men were not penalized for, and sometimes benefited from, being a parent. The audit study showed that actual employers discriminate against mothers, but not against fathers.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/901358f5c0453775d7f4d0e3c57d8fb3ce26dc61

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Citations in the corpus

Cultural Schemas, Social Class, and the Flexibility Stigma (2013, background): “These studies show that caregiving fathers are at risk of greater masculinity harassment and general mistreatment; the fatherhood bonus documented by earlier studies was limited to traditional fathers who evidenced little domestic work (Correll et al., 2007; Cuddy et al., 2004).”
Fathers and the Flexibility Stigma (2013, neutral): “Our specific project focused on the question of whether men experience an earnings penalty if they engage in labor force participation behaviors that are more typical of mothers (Astone et al., 2010; Correll et al., 2007; Maume, 2006; Schneer & Reitman, 2002).”
Twitter's Glass Ceiling: The Effect of Perceived Gender on Online Visibility (2016, background): “Multiple disciplines report occupational gender segregation (Sugimoto, Ni, and Larivière 2015) and gender disparities in pay and employment, especially for mothers (Correll and Benard 2007).”
Work–Family Policy Trade-Offs for Mothers? Unpacking the Cross-National Variation in Motherhood Earnings Penalties (2016, background): “Correll, Benard, and Paik (2007) provide evidence of employer discrimination with their experimental research in the United States, as do Glass and Fodor (2011) with their research based on interviews of employers and antidiscrimination cases in Hungary.”
Concealable Stigma and Occupational Segregation (2015, neutral): “…experimental (audit) studies have convincingly established that discrimination on the basis of race (Bertrand and Mullainathan, 2004), motherhood (Correll, Benard, and Paik, 2007), and sexual orientation (Tilcsik, 2011) continues to play an important role in many labor markets, much less is…”
Flexible Work Practices: A Source of Career Premiums or Penalties? (2012, methodology): “We used the names “Sarah” and “Matthew” because they are common names that have been used in prior research (Correll et al., 2007).”
Are motherhood penalties and fatherhood bonuses warranted? Comparing pro-work behaviors and conditions of mothers, fathers, and non-parents (2011, background): “Male and female students in Correll et al.’s (2007) experimental study were less likely to promote, hire, or recommend mothers for management positions compared to non-mothers.”
The Positive Consequences of Negative Stereotypes (2014, background): “First, I examine the consequences of race and sexual orientation for salary 8I also ran chi-square tests for independence between the experimental condition to which a respondent was assigned and their sex, age, education, region, and marital status, where age and education were broken into broad…”
The Paradox of Publicity (2014, background): “At the individual level, status characteristics, such as gender, race, education, and parental status, have been shown to positively influence assessments of task performance of individuals from highly esteemed groups (Berger et al., 1977; Ridgeway et al., 1998; Correll, Benard, and Paik, 2007).”
Hiring Discrimination: An Overview of (Almost) All Correspondence Experiments Since 2005 (2017, background): “study from Belgium and one from the United States, respectively (Capéau et al., 2012; Correll et al., 2007).”