Less Pay for Mothers?

A landmark study by Cornell University has quantified what many working mothers have suspected for years:
Women with children are less likely to get hired and are paid less in starting salaries than similarly qualified fathers or women without children. Bad news for career mothers :(


There is no federal law prohibiting a potential employer from asking a woman - or man -
about their family. Some states have such laws, but their effectiveness varies widely.



Shelley Correll, author of the study and an associate professor of sociology at Cornell in Ithaca, N.Y., says she not only found proof of discrimination in her 18-month study, she also found salaries for working mothers tended to decrease exponentially with each
additional child.

She launched the study - "The Motherhood Penalty" - after hearing complaints from mothers for years.

To test her suspicion, she created two fictitious applicants seeking a job as a marketing director for a communications company.
Both had virtually identical qualifications and resumes with no indication of gender or family status. The applications were presented to
60 undergraduates - both men and women - for evaluation. The reviewers found the applicants to be equal and said they had no hiring preference.
Correll used undergraduates because she believed them to be most closely attuned to the
current hiring climate. She also assumed they had been raised in an age when sensibilities about working mothers had changed.

Next, the same resumes were shown to another set of undergraduate evaluators. This time, though, the applicants were both women.

A memo was slipped into one of the application packets mentioning she was a mother of two. Her resume was changed slightly to include a reference to being an officer of a parent-teacher association.

The outcome changed dramatically.
The evaluators said they would hire the childless
women 84 percent of the time.
The mothers were given a job only 47 percent of the time.
The mothers also were offered a starting salary of $11,000 less than their counterparts without children.

How horrifying to be entering the professional career field as a mother!

Facts taken for Womenwork.org/pdfresources/mothers
Article from the Denver Post