{"id":1184,"date":"2019-03-27T03:51:13","date_gmt":"2019-03-27T03:51:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sportsnewsforyou.com\/?p=1184"},"modified":"2019-03-27T03:51:13","modified_gmt":"2019-03-27T03:51:13","slug":"men-get-raises-for-being-dads-while-women-suffer-wage-penalties-for-being-mothers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/?p=1184","title":{"rendered":"Men Get Raises For Being Dads While Women Suffer Wage Penalties For Being Mothers"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re told gender equality in the workplace is the best it\u2019s ever been. Forty years ago, only <\/span>half of all women in the United States worked, compared to 80 percent of men, and those that did earned just 55 cents to a man\u2019s dollar. These days, women make up half of the nation\u2019s workforce, and those between the ages of 25 and 34 are earning 93 percent of what a man their same age earns. There are now even some fields where women are outearning men. We\u2019re not there yet, but workplace equality seems to be improving\u2014that is, until you have a kid. While studies have found that the gender pay gap is decreasing, it\u2019s unfortunately not the case for mothers. For parents, the gender pay gap is getting even worse.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s women incur a \u201cmotherhood penalty\u201d\u2014whereas men are rewarded with a \u201cfatherhood premium.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s so bad, in fact, that motherhood is shockingly one of the <\/span>strongest predictors of bankruptcy and poverty. Today\u2019s women incur what sociologist Michelle Budig calls a \u201cmotherhood penalty\u201d\u2014whereas men are rewarded with a \u201cfatherhood premium.\u201d In her research analyzing income within the context of age and children, Budig found that women, on average, earn 4 percent less per child they birth or adopt. At even a modest salary of \u00a0$50,000, that\u2019s a $2,000 per year penalty. Men, on the other hand, earn a 6\u00a0percent bonus per procreation. So if you\u2019re balking at the price of brunch this year, consider the fact that your mere existence may have cost your mother thousands. \u00a0<\/p>\n

This gap is, in part, due to the fact that <\/span>women are more likely than men to take time off for their kids\u2014or opt for a job that\u2019s less time intensive (and often lower paid) to care for children. Research from Pew found that 42 percent of mothers reduce their work hours and 27 percent quit their jobs. For men, those numbers are much lower: 28 and 10 percent respectively. At home, the husband\u2019s role has traditionally been the breadwinner, and it seems as though not much has changed, despite the advancements women have made. It\u2019s tempting to leave the explanation at that, a symptom of tradition\u2014women take maternity leave, act as stay-at-home parents, switch to a less taxing career. While problematic, it\u2019s not surprising. But that\u2019s far from the full story. In fact, Budig found that this only accounts for about one-third of the motherhood penalty. The rest is straight up bias.<\/p>\n

\u201cFatherhood,\u201d <\/span>Budig says in her report, \u201cis a valued characteristic of employers, signaling perhaps greater work commitment, stability, and deservingness.\u201d Women, on the other hand, are judged more harshly by employers once they have children.<\/p>\n

This paradigm is well-supported by other research too. Law professor Joan Williams reviewed the research on stereotyping in the workplace and <\/span>found that mothers are considered lesser employees\u2014they are assumed to be both less attentive to work and less capable. Researchers at Cornell University confirmed this as well. When they asked people to evaluate hypothetical job applicants, mothers were judged as less committed and less competent than nonmothers.<\/p>\n

In our workforce, children turn men into assets and turn women into liabilities.<\/p>\n

This bias plays out in an even scarier way than you\u2019d think: Moms were six times less likely to be recommended for hire and offered a salary that was 8 percent lower than that of nonmothers. For men, it was the inverse; their salaries were even higher when they had kids. Researchers didn\u2019t stop there. To test this theory in the real world, they sent out 1,276 fake resumes to real employers across a number of different fields. But the bias still held true: nonmothers were more than twice as likely to be called for an interview as mothers. Fathers were twice as likely to be called as nonfathers. In our workforce, children turn men into assets and turn\u00a0women into liabilities.<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/span>We\u2019re trapped in this self-reinforcing cycle,\u201d economist Sari Kerr told The New York Times<\/em>. Couples will choose one parent to make career sacrifices for children, usually the person making less money. That\u2019s often the mother, but the reason she\u2019s making less in the first place is that she\u2019s a mother. The problematic pattern continues: Women are paid less, with the problem exacerbated by fathers actually getting paid more.<\/p>\n

Society already undervalues the work women do as mothers\u2014cooking, cleaning, childcare\u2014which they still do <\/span>more of than men. And apparently, we also greatly undervalue and underpay what mothers do at work, further perpetuating the stigma around women\u2019s roles. Even when couples reject the traditional breadwinner husband and child-rearing housewife roles at home, women\u2019s lagging wages in the workplace reinforce the outdated structure. Women can make all the progress in the world, but until the workplace stops differentiating between mothers and fathers, women will continue to be penalized for being the ones to give birth.<\/p>\n

Photo sourced from Pexels and HumanResourcesmba.net.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re told gender equality in the workplace is the best it\u2019s ever been. Forty years ago, only half of all women in the United States worked, compared to 80 percent of men, and those that did earned just 55 cents to a man\u2019s dollar. These days, women make up half of the nation\u2019s workforce, and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}