New research indicates that employers who are reluctant to hire or promote mums may have their assumptions precisely backwards.
Five-minute read. – 100% written by humans.
It’s the dark triad of the new mum returning to work; exhaustion, brain fog and a slump in confidence. But new research by Huiyao Liao at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and colleagues, in their recent paper published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, suggests that it may be high time to challenge many of the old prejudices about mothers returning to the workplace.
There is a simple but remarkably illuminating session with which we often open leadership workshops. Colleagues are simply encouraged to talk freely about their journey and life experiences while the rest of the group listens.
Prejudice below the radar
The contribution of Lisa, a 42-year-old senior account manager could not have been timelier, given the publication of the recent research. Lisa talked about her experience of returning to work as a new mother in a way that chimed with many of the women in the group.
She felt that she was given less responsibility and fewer challenges. She found herself more frequently on the outside of informal meetings. She sensed that the plum parts of client presentations were more likely to go to male colleagues. All of this was happening at a level beneath the radar that she didn’t feel she could really call out, but nonetheless it felt very real.
Motherhood as Performance Multiplier
But here’s the rub. Despite the many challenges of motherhood, Lisa felt convinced that becoming a mum had helped her to acquire greater depth, perspective, self-knowledge, and resourcefulness. In short, becoming a mother – far from making her weaker – had made her stronger and smarter. Many in the group expressed that they identified strongly with Lisa’s experiences. Motherhood is both a performance drain and a performance multiplier. But it now appears that it may be far more multiplier than drain.
The motherhood penalty
It seems likely that the prejudices that Lisa sensed were not just in her imagination. The so-called ‘motherhood penalty’ is real and backed up by a solid body of research in the field of labour economics.
After having children, women typically experience disadvantages that fathers do not. These include lower lifetime earnings, slower promotion and fewer high-profile opportunities.
Studies repeatedly find that identical CVs are rated less favourably once the female applicant is described as having children. Believe it or not, there is actually a modest “fatherhood premium”, fathers being viewed as more stable or responsible.
How the research worked
So, what does the research tell us about the reality? Huiyao Liao and her team started by developing a scale with the snappy title, The ‘family-centred symbolic meaning of work.’ Thankfully there’s an acronym, the FCSMW. The team wanted to explore the hypothesis that one of the benefits of going out and working is that it means a parent can model desirable behaviours to their children.
Using interview statements across a sample of Chinese and American respondents, the team were able to validate the scale. The scale focused on the extent to which respondents felt that behaviour at work modelled the sort of qualities that they aspired to see in their children. These include: responsibility, perseverance, self-respect, and organisational skills.
This enabled the team to create a questionnaire that was then used across a sample of 600 Chinese and American working parents. What emerged was a direct correlation between how highly a parent scores on the scale and their improved performance when it comes to work outcomes. There was a similar correlation for working fathers, but the strength of the correlation was remarkably strong for mothers. The evidence of the study is incontrovertible. Motherhood was shown to be strongly associated with improved work outcomes.
Chimes with the experience of many working mothers
The research findings chime with the observations of many leaders and mothers in the real world. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the first female member of the U.S. Supreme Court, put it like this, “I felt that each part of my life gave me respite from the other.”
Ginsburg repeatedly explained that motherhood did not hold her back; instead, it replenished her energy and perspective for her professional work. It is one of the earliest and most influential expressions of what researchers now call work–family enrichment rather than work–family conflict.
Becky Kennedy, the clinical Psychologist and author, argues that we are most effective as parents when we work on the assumption that “Kids are good inside.” It’s an attitude that when applied to the people we lead in the workplace, creates a climate of high-trust leadership.
As leadership researcher Jaclyn Margolis notes, motherhood teaches leaders to adopt this generous interpretation in the workplace, improving empathy and judgement.
Old prejudices die hard
In short, the research shows that far from impeding work performance, motherhood has the potential to enhance it. So that settles the matter then? Not so fast.
When the team presented their findings to business leaders in China, they were met with a wall of scepticism. When confronted with the hard data, some corporate bosses even went as far as to challenge the validity of the findings. It seems that old prejudices die hard.
Two important caveats
There are a couple of important caveats to make here. There are pathways to growth and wisdom that do not entail parenthood. We have met many child-free leaders who are extraordinary human beings. And it’s worth noting that there is some evidence that being a child-free woman leader can carry a degree of stigma that does not apply to male counterparts.
Parenthood is of course not synonymous with motherhood. We have met legions of hard-working and committed fathers who tell us that parenthood has been their primary route to growth and wisdom. As a single parent of two teenagers, I can certainly attest to this.
Nonetheless, I would be naive to believe that my gender does not give me an advantage. As a working single father, I don’t tend to be viewed through the same lens as a working single mother. It’s pretty much all the fatherhood premium as opposed to the fatherhood penalty.
Combating deep-rooted biases
In the words of the research team, “This highlights how deeply rooted such biases are in people’s minds, which underscores the need for more research like ours in order to ultimately combat these biases and eradicate the motherhood penalty.”
They have a point. If unchallenged, prevailing assumptions about motherhood will result in a significant loss in potential performance. Corporations fail to capitalise on talent, while individual mothers fail to fulfil their potential because they absorb and internalize these assumptions.
There is another reason why organisations need to sit up sharpish and take note of the motherhood-premium-versus-motherhood-penalty issue.
The risk of wasted potential
In 1991, around 30% of people in senior roles in the UK were women. This didn’t change hugely for the next quarter of a century, rising to about 33% in 2013. However, the last decade has seen the sharpest increase, with the proportion of women in senior roles rising to about 40%. When you consider that 57% of all graduates are now female, many commentators believe that women will outnumber men in leadership roles within the next decade. And approximately 80% of those women will become mothers at some stage during their career.
Attitudes need to shift at both a societal and an organisational level. At the same time, we need to support mothers on an individual level, so that they can visibly accentuate the motherhood premium and demolish old prejudices.
Changing the story we create for ourselves
At Threshold, we encourage leaders to recognize that we make sense of the world and our role in it by creating a story for ourselves. There is a wealth of research that indicates that this “story of self” tends to have a powerful influence both on what we do and the outcomes we achieve. If we create a work environment where mothers are encouraged to internalize the story of exhaustion, brain fog and low confidence, the narrative that it is consistent with the motherhood penalty is the one that tends to prevail.
The capabilities we need in an era of AI
We now have hard evidence for an alternative story. It’s a story of growth, wisdom, resourcefulness, resilience, empathy and emotional intelligence. (In short, the sort of uniquely human capabilities that will be needed more than ever in an era of AI.)
Individually tailored leadership development coaching, mentoring and sponsorship have been shown to close the gender gap remarkably effectively.
What are your stories of motherhood, fatherhood, or choosing a child-free life? We would love to hear.
Email: james@threshold.co.uk
To find out how we can help leaders in your organisation to be more impactful, influential and persuasive visit www.threshold.co.uk
