Nancy Folbre is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Employers often define ideal managers as individuals who are not only smart, reliable and committed, but also willing to drop everything else in their life to get the job done. Like the protagonists of Ayn Rand novels, managers should be unencumbered by responsibilities for the care of dependents (who cannot always be dropped).
In a telling episode last December, Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania praised the appointment of Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona as secretary of Homeland Security, “because for that job you have to have no life. Janet has no family. Perfect. She can devote, literally, 19-20 hours a day to it.” Governor Rendell did not realize his microphone was on. He later explained that he has no life either.
During the 1920s and 1930s, many employers refused to hire married women, or fired them once they married. As my fellow Economix blogger Casey Mulligan points out, such “marriage bars” are not allowed today. But family responsibilities still weigh more heavily on women than on men, accounting for much of the pay gap between the sexes. Some policy analysts argue that mothers make a lifestyle choice, opting for easier, more flexible work over greater responsibility and higher pay. Others, like myself, argue that our economic system imposes unfair penalties on those who care for others.
But shouldn’t both sides in this debate protest when women (or men) are penalized simply because they are caregivers? Considerable evidence suggests that maternal responsibility intensifies gender stereotyping in harmful — and often illegal — ways.
Employers sometimes assume that women with care responsibilities will be, and should be, less committed to their jobs. Such assumptions and beliefs can influence employment outcomes even when caregivers work just as long and hard as everybody else.
Joan Williams of the University of California Hastings College of the Law has pioneered analysis of the impact of a “maternal wall” on women’s career trajectories. A growing body of case law develops the concept of Family Responsibilities Discrimination. The literal acronym is FRD, but it is sometimes referred to as FRED, a name that is easier to remember.
In May 2007, the Equal Opportunities Employment Commission issued official guidance on FRED, explaining circumstances under which discrimination against caregivers violates existing law.
It’s not always easy to determine whether discriminatory attitudes — rather than difficult-to-measure differences in actual job performance — underlie disparate outcomes. But sociologists Shelley Correll, Stephen Benard and In Paik take a step in this direction with research analyzing responses to job applications with credentials equivalent except for signals of parenthood.
In one experiment, about 200 undergraduates were asked to rate paired applications for an imaginary midlevel managerial job. Both female and male students rated mothers lower on competence and commitment, recommended lower salaries for them, and judged them less worthy of promotion than childless women.
In an even more convincing audit study, fictional résumés and cover letters were sent to employers advertising midlevel marketing and business job openings at a large Northeastern city newspaper. Childless women received 2.1 times as many callbacks as mothers.
Fathers, however, were not penalized.
The experimental evidence here, as in other audit studies, strongly suggests that employers are influenced by cultural norms and signals of group membership as well as individual merit.
Ayn Rand probably never sent out a résumé, never had children and didn’t particularly like them. But she didn’t like hypocritical double standards, either.
Comments are no longer being accepted.