The motherhood penalty and the professional credential: inequality in career development for those with professional degrees

Abstract

Transitions from education to work constitute a distinct set of situations where discrimination is likely to occur. Gender beliefs generally disadvantage women, and when coupled with beliefs regarding parental responsibility, tend to heavily disadvantage mothers. Yet we suggest that professional credentials create a divided labour market, with ameliorative effects. Credentials tend to match specifically to jobs and replace other means of determining the performance expectations of various job candidates. This should be especially true in the public sector, where hiring procedures are more transparent. As a result, we hypothesise that mothers with professional credentials will be less disadvantaged within the occupational market matched to their credentials, especially in the public sector. Data from Sweden, following 43,646 graduates with professional degrees into the labour market, generally support this interpretation, though substantial motherhood penalties remain in many professions. We briefly discuss the implications of these findings.

Do Predictors of Career Success Differ between Swedish Women and Men? Data from the Swedish Longitudinal Occupational Survey of Health (SLOSH)

“…Based on previous findings, it was expected that women with children living at home would have a smaller salary increase than men [ 14 , 15 , 21 – 24 ]. Contrary to expectations the present results indicated that having children living at home predicted an above-average salary increase among women to a significantly higher extent than among men.…”

“…education and hours worked), and salary were stronger for women than men, whereas they found no gender differences in predictors of promotion [ 13 ]. However, results from two recent prospective studies indicate that human capital variables are better rewarded in terms of salary for men than women [ 14 , 15 ]. To our knowledge, no prospective study of gender differences in predictors of objective career success has been conducted using a contemporary representative sample of the Swedish working population.…”

Gender and leadership aspiration: The impact of work–life initiatives

“…Looking not merely at parental status but caregiving obligations, Henle, Fisher, and Mattingly (2015) further emphasized the link between caregiving and lower performance ratings and unfavorable hiring situations. Put differently, women who become mothers are less likely to be hired or promoted (Berggren & Lauster, 2014;Cuddy, Fiske, & Glick, 2004). As today work-family conflict is still considered a women's issue (Padavic, Ely, & Reid, 2013), Hoobler, Lemmon, and Wayne (2011) showed that sometimes the mere expectation that women face a potential family-work conflict, being the so-called family-work-conflict bias, is associated with lower performance reviews and fewer promotions.…”

A societal perspective on self-employment – Sweden as an example

“…Education is a field in which 80 per cent of the students are female; despite this, only double the number of women as men were self-employed in 2012. Previous research has shown that men educated in low-income occupations were more likely than their female counterparts to leave their careers for another that paid better (Acker 1990;Berggren and Lauster 2014;Kauppinen-Toropainen and Lammi 1993). Teaching professions are comparatively low-paid in Sweden.…”