The motherhood penalty might be fading

Conventional wisdom, backed by mountains of research, holds that motherhood is a career killer.

Women with children are routinely overlooked for jobs, underestimated by colleagues and underpaid relative to men with the same qualifications. Researchers call this the “motherhood penalty.”

But a new study by Professor Christopher D. Petsko at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School suggests the penalty might be fading. What’s emerging in its place, however, raises new concerns about workplace discrimination.

Petsko and his colleagues find a “parenthood boost” in which both mothers and fathers are perceived as more competent, intelligent and more worthy of career opportunities than equally qualified non-parents. The effect applied equally to men and women, though it was stronger for white parents than Black parents.

He conducted the research with Columbia University’s Rebecca Ponce de Leon and Ashleigh Shelby Rosette of Duke University, and their findings are published in “Beyond the motherhood penalty: Evidence of a (potentially race-based) parenthood boost in workplace evaluations” in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

For decades the motherhood penalty reflected assumptions that mothers were less committed to their careers, says Petsko. “But with women now comprising half the workforce and dual-income households becoming the norm, being a working mother isn’t that unusual anymore,” he says. “People don’t see it as remarkable — or problematic.”

The question is whether this “parenthood boost” represents progress or just a new form of bias that disadvantages childless workers and favors white parents over Black parents.

A halo effect for parents

Past research shows that men enjoy a premium at work for being fathers: higher status, better pay and more opportunities. Women, on the other hand, typically face the opposite. Studies show that when people learn a woman is a mother, they’re more likely to question her dedication and competence. She gets fewer job offers, fewer promotions and less training.

The so-called motherhood penalty is one of the most well-documented forms of workplace bias. Much of the research was conducted decades ago, often on relatively small samples, and at a time when societal attitudes about working mothers were changing rapidly. Still, when Petsko and his colleagues began their study, they didn’t set out to overturn those findings.

“Our initial interest was not so much in assessing whether the motherhood penalty was alive and well — it was about measuring whether it would be starker and more severe for Black women,” he says. “For two decades, the motherhood penalty was widely assumed to be true.”

The research team ran a series of experiments involving roughly 5,000 U.S. adults.

In the first, participants saw a profile of a fictional McKinsey consultant and rated that person on competence, warmth and whether they deserved a promotion or developmental opportunities. The profile was identical for everyone, with one critical manipulation: Some participants learned the consultant was a parent and others didn’t. The consultant’s name also changed to signal race and gender.

They found that employees described as parents were rated more favorably across the board, regardless of gender. The boost was consistent enough to suggest a real, measurable effect.

In the second experiment, participants evaluated employees described as single parents or not, across race and gender. The researchers again found no motherhood penalty. Instead, parents received more positive evaluations.

“Parents have a halo effect,” says Petsko. “We see raising a family as virtuous and that spills over into how we view them as coworkers. Parents are seen as more intelligent, more capable and more skillful.”

Petsko attributes this to the “lens model” of stereotyping, which suggests that people tend to zero in on one aspect of a person’s identity at a time, such as their gender or their race, rather than taking in everything at once. In this case, once people learned someone was a parent, it seemed to crowd out other considerations. Gender receded into the background.

But the boost wasn’t equal. It tended to be larger and more reliable for white employees than for Black employees. In other words, while parenthood helps nearly everyone, it helps white workers more.

That the boost favored white parents, Petsko says, reflects that whiteness is the cultural default in the U.S. “Cultural prescriptions like ‘good people have kids’ get applied more strongly to those who fit that default.”

New biases and risks

But that uneven advantage creates a blind spot: Managers might exhibit racial bias through parenthood preferences without realizing it. They think they’re rewarding parenthood, not race, but white employees disproportionately benefit.

The parenthood boost might also introduce other risks for workers without children. They could receive less flexibility from their bosses, for instance, or fewer accommodations than their colleagues with kids.

And because they’re not perceived as warm or trustworthy in the same way parents are, they might be treated as less deserving of consideration. “We place a lot of moral value on being a parent,” Petsko says. “But if you don’t want kids? People are suspicious of you and that can translate into career inequities.”

To be clear, the researchers stop short of saying that the motherhood penalty has disappeared. Women still face a growing gender pay gap, reduced employment protections and unequal burdens at home. These are structural barriers that shape their careers in ways that quick evaluations in a lab setting can’t capture, Petsko says. “There are still lots of obstacles women face when they become parents that men don’t.”

But when it comes to snap evaluations in the workplace, the motherhood penalty appears to be losing its grip. The research finding underscores how powerful parenthood status can be in shaping perceptions at work, and how unevenly those perceptions break along racial lines.