The "Motherhood Penalty"

Because of the normative conceptions of what a “normal” family looks like and what a “normal” mother is (e.g. SNAF-encoded households), women are faced with a two-fold set of obstacles that inhibit them from reducing the wage disparity between men and women. The first obstacle is the unequal distribution of labor within the private sphere, which burdens mothers with a disproportionate amount of household chores (the “second shift”). The second obstacle is the culturally perceived tension between what it means to be an “ideal worker” and what it means to be an “ideal mother” (the “motherhood penalty”).

As stated by Dorothy Edith Smith in The Standard North American Family: SNAF as an Ideological Code, SNAF is a normative conception of the family as a legally married couple sharing a household. Within this household there are distinctive roles for both the adult male and adult female. The male participates in paid employment to fulfill his role as the primary breadwinner of the family, whereas the female may or may not participate in paid labor.

Under the ideological code of SNAF, it is not necessary for the female to make income, because her primary responsibility is to take care of the husband, child, and household. As such, her potential income is merely viewed as supplementary.

As a result, women who take work outside their household duties are not viewed as standard, and are considered to be deviating from the normal structure of the nuclear family. Because of the primary identification of women as mothers and being primarily concerned with the rearing of children, the burden of caring for the child is placed entirely upon the mother.

Additionally, a mothers formal identification with caretaker often times lead into their decision to not pursue professional careers, which directly contributes to the unequal pay between men and women. The most frustrating aspect of this dilemma is that women feel the need to choose between either marriage or work, whereas men operate under the assumption that they can have both. Namely, because they do not have to be burdened with the household affairs

Shelley J. Correll in Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty, argues that in addition to workplace discrimination based on sex, mothers face an additional penalty because of their status characteristic as mothers, called the “motherhood penalty”. This occurs because the salient feature of “motherhood” is a devalued status characteristic in the eyes of prospective employers, due to the perceived tension between the normative conceptions of “ideal mother” and “ideal worker”. What it means to be an “ideal worker” is the ability to devote endless amounts of hours to one's work, whereas what it means to be an “ideal mother” is to devote oneself entirely to her family and children.

Accordingly, in the eyes of employers, mothers are not ideal candidates for employment and are discriminated against for their status as a mother. When evaluating a candidate, Correll argues that employers judge “performance capacity” upon two criteria: competence (ability) and effort (commitment). Mothers are viewed as lacking in both criteria due to the aforementioned conceptions of mothers.

Structuring her experiment around these ideas, Correll’s lab experiment showed that when all other status characteristics were held constant, (e.g. race, class, gender) whereas “motherhood” was made salient, the results confirmed the hypothesis of the motherhood penalty. Mothers as opposed to non-mothers were hired at a lower rate, were offered lower starting salaries, and were also less likely to be considered for promotion. Also, in support of the SNAF-encoded nuclear family, fathers were offered a higher initial salary as opposed to non-fathers, probably because of the belief that fathers should be the primary bread winners and support the family financially.

Thus, we can see how the cultural beliefs of the normal family serves as an obstacle in the fight against unequal wage distribution between men and women. Primarily by i) restricting women from participating in the workplace because of being overburdened with work in the household and ii) facing real and material consequences for being labeled as mothers.