The Concept of Motherhood Penalties

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The issue of gender equality has become popular in different areas of study, especially beginning in the late 20th century. In the workplace, proponents of this concept argue that people should have equal access to job opportunities regardless of their gender. The campaign for gender equality has transformed the 21st-century workplace with women being assessed for promotion and other work-related aspects based on merit, as opposed to their gender, even though such an argument is debatable.

However, an insidious phenomenon has emerged, and it adversely affects women who decide to have children and remain in the workplace. The available research shows that mothers are being subjected to significant wage penalties in the workplace because they have borne children. In other words, the decision to become a mother comes with associated disadvantages on top of the long-running gender-based discrimination that women have been experiencing in their lives.

This paper is a reflection on the concept of motherhood penalties, as presented in the article “Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty?” by Correll, Benard, and Paik (2007).

One of the interesting concepts presented in this article is the issue of motherhood penalty. At first, when I saw the title of the article, I thought that it is bizarre that women would be punished for having children. However, a clear look at its contents reveals that this issue is not based on anecdotes or personal opinions. On the contrary, the question of motherhood penalty has been researched and documented in reputable scholarly journals.

According to Correll et al. (2007), two recent studies have established that employed mothers in the US are punished with a per-child wage penalty of around 5 percent after the researchers controlled for the normal occupational and human capital factors affecting wages. In an interesting discovery, one study found that the pay gap between non-mothers and mothers aged below 35 years is larger than that between men and women. Therefore, based on these findings, employed mothers are the most disadvantaged group of workers experiencing the largest pay gap.

The issue of the motherhood penalty is important in modern society because apart from being bizarre and retrogressive, it compounds the problem of the gender pay gap and other inequalities that women have been experiencing since the civilization of societies.

The proponents of gender equality have achieved recommendable results in their quest to ensure that people are judged based on meritocracy as opposed to their gender. However, the fight against gender inequality is not over with the emergence of this motherhood penalty. Women are being punished for having children, and as expected, those that choose not to become mothers are rewarded. This kind of thinking is wrong as it directly discourages women from having children, which is counterproductive at different levels.

First, the only way to replenish the workforce and ensure that society has enough people to meet staffing needs in the workplace is through giving birth. In other words, if the majority of women decided to pursue the benefits of not having children as proposed by the structuring of wages, it means that ultimately, the very organizations promoting this anomaly will not have enough workers.

Therefore, even by holding all other factors at constant, the idea of penalizing motherhood in the workplace is counterproductive on its own. Consequently, employers should be rewarding mothers as part of their long-term strategy of ensuring that there will be enough employees in the future to support the continued existence of these organizations.

Second, women have suffered for long through institutionalized discrimination based on their gender. Therefore, adding another angle of suffering to an already marginalized group of individuals compounds their undeserved suffering. This is the time to support women’s rights and gender equality because women are not lesser human beings. It is wrong to punish women for participating in the only natural process available to ensure that humanity does not become extinct.

The desire to give birth is universal – even when plants and other animals (apart from human beings) are threatened with death, they give birth for the continuity of their species. When plants are exposed to adverse weather environments, natural instincts set in to reproduce so that they do not die without leaving their progenies behind.

Even from an evolutionary perspective, the process of natural selection relied on the concept of preserving the fittest species to reproduce for the posterity of life on earth. As such, it is baffling that civilized society would turn against the very processes that have supported the advancement of humanity. However, it is important to understand the reasoning behind the motherhood penalty in a bid to place the issue in its right context.

A variety of factors has been put forward to explain the concept of motherhood penalty based on the wage gap. For instance, mothers allegedly invest less in the development of human capital as compared to non-mothers. Similarly, mothers are likely to be less committed or put effort into their work as compared to non-mothers.

In general, Correll et al. (2007) argue that reasons behind the motherhood wage penalty can be “classified as those that seek to identify important differences in the traits, skills, and behaviors between mothers and non-mothers (i.e., worker explanations) and those that rely on the differential preference for or treatment of mothers and non-mothers (i.e., discrimination explanations” (p. 1299).

Some of the explanations put forward concerning this issue make sense when addressed critically. For instance, a study conducted in England in 2001 found that mothers are less productive at work as compared to non-mothers because they are likely to be interrupted in the career development journey, work part-time, or discriminated against by their employers (Correll et al., 2007).

The best-known hypothesis explaining the wage gap between mothers and non-mothers is that of work effort. First, mothers would exhaust their energy reserves taking care of their children, hence low productivity, as opposed to non-mothers. Additionally, mothers would be distracted by constantly thinking about their children, among other mediating factors that link motherhood to low productivity.

However, in their study, Correll et al. (2007) found that even in cases where mothers showed equal productivity as non-mother, the pay gap still existed, which implies that discrimination forces by employers could be at play under such circumstances. Therefore, even when mothers are willing to put the expected efforts and commitment to their work, they are likely to pay the motherhood penalty due to stereotypical discrimination based on the assumption that they are not competent.

The overall theme that arises from this article is that of gender discrimination because Correll et al. (2007) found that fathers were actually rewarded for becoming parents. Fathers are seen as responsible men, hence the implicit assumption that they could be good employees. Therefore, the issue of gender discrimination stands out, which is also the same theme that comes out in the article, “Does Unequal Housework Lead to Divorce? Evidence from Sweden” by Ruppanner, Brandén, and Turunen (2018). In this article, the authors found that women are likely to perform more household duties as compared to men.

Interestingly, women who report cases of uneven housework, which means they do more than their male partners, are likely to be unsatisfied with their relationships, and they are thus highly likely to consider breaking-up their unions. Therefore, women are disadvantaged because they do the largest part of domestic chores, which leads to their dissatisfaction, hence high divorce rates. The underlying issue in this observation is that of gender discrimination and inequality. By virtue of being women, these individuals have to fit into traditional stereotypes of being housewives, but they are punished for that through divorce.

This argument, as presented by Ruppanner et al. (2018), is linked to the issues fronted by Correll et al. (2007). First, in the two articles, women are discriminated against and punished for being women. In Corell et al. (2007), women are penalized for being mothers, while in Ruppanner et al. (2018), they are punished for being housewives.

Second, these arguments speak to the broad issue of gender inequality and discrimination. This connection is important conceptually and theoretically because it highlights the pervasive nature of gender inequality, both in the workplace and at home. Researchers could use this understanding to inform their work on this crucial subject that continues to affect women disproportionately.

Gender-based discrimination and inequality are important aspects that affect women in contemporary times. From the article by Corell et al. (2007), motherhood is punished as mothers experience significant wage gaps when compared to non-mothers. In the article by Ruppanner et al. (2018), women are likely to perform more household duties as compared to their male partners, and this aspect contributes to high divorce rates among such women. These articles underline the permeating nature of gender-based inequality, whether at home or in the workplace. The connection between the two articles is important because it presents research gaps that could be addressed in future studies.

Works Cited

Correll, Shelley, Stephen Benard, and In Paik. 2007. “Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty?” American Journal of Sociology 112(5): 1297-1338.

Ruppanner, Leah, Maria Brandén, and Jani Turunen. 2018. “Does Unequal Housework Lead to Divorce? Evidence from Sweden.” Sociology 52(1): 75-94.

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The Concept of Motherhood Penalties

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