Moms with straight As in high school get similar leadership opportunities as dads who got failing grades
Moms with straight As in high school get similar leadership opportunities as dads who got failing grades
One of the defining characteristics of the economic devastation wrought by this pandemic is how unevenly it’s been distributed.
Low-wage service workers, often people of color, have been hit much harder than white-collar workers who can do their jobs at home. And women have been affected more drastically than men, prompting some to call this a “she-cession.”
That all makes recent research on workplace gender gaps all the more disturbing. A new study provides more evidence that mothers are particularly penalized in the workplace.
Researchers Yue Qian and Jill E. Yavorsky used data from a federal study of thousands of baby boomers surveyed over more than four decades “specifically looking at the number of people that they later managed during their early to mid-careers,” Yavorsky said.
Yavorsky, a sociologist at University of North Carolina, Charlotte, said their study found that those with higher GPAs in high school ended up supervising more employees later in their careers. Men managed on average two or three more people than women. But when she looked at parents, the gender gap was much wider.
“Among those who earned a 4.0 GPA, fathers manage nearly five times the number of people that mothers do,” Yavorsky said.
In fact, mothers who earned straight As ended up with the same leadership opportunities as fathers who received failing grades in high school. And the gap persisted even when correcting the number of hours worked or years in the workforce.
Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, who directs the nonprofit group MomsRising, said the findings are sad, but she does not find them surprising.
“We hear stories all the time about the motherhood penalty.” She added that they’ve found “people [women] who have equal resumes, equal job experiences, making significantly less than their male counterparts.”
A growing body of research suggests it’s not just the unequal sharing of parenting duties that hurts moms’ careers, but cultural biases that lead to dramatic hiring and pay disparities.
“We think of men as being all the more capable and competent on the job once they become fathers in the U.S., where women are considered categorically less capable and committed on the job once they become mothers,” said Caitlyn Collins, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis.
During the pandemic, many mothers have been forced to cut back on their hours or leave jobs to care for kids, often because they make less than a male partner, perpetuating a vicious cycle that reinforces those stereotypes.
There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible.
Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
