Does full time work affect childhood development?

Over the last generation, there have been an increasing number of working parents---a phenomenon that’s enabled more couples to be more financially comfortable, on the whole. But it’s come with the healthily and effectively raise children the way parents would like.

The last few decades have produced research on the effects of full time maternal employment on the behavior and achievement of children---but the conclusions of this research have been mixed, and largely reflected the prevailing ‘wisdom’ of the moment.

Understanding the perceptions of these effects, however, can tell us multitudes about the decisions that women are making today. In her seminar on “Stereotype Accuracy: Do College Women Miss the Mark when Estimating the Impact of Maternal Employment on Children’s Development?,” Professor Wendy Goldberg of UC Irvine discussed how college women frame the issue---and how accurate those stereotypes are.

She and her team found that most women overestimate the negative effects of motherhood on their children---i.e. they’d assume that working mothers would raise children with worse behavioral problems like aggression and depression, and that perform worse academically---and that women underestimate the positive effects: that having a working mother would provide a roll model as well as greater financial opportunities for her children, among others.

Accordingly, many mothers may seek to adjust their work lives accordingly, with part-time work or opting out entirely. The effect of this might be either a greater inclusion of mothers into the workforce, or a gender-segregation by jobs---particularly those who seek to advance after a break for childcare. Moreover, steady work reportedly offers the greatest mental and physical health benefits to women. Stereotypes regarding the negative effects of working mothers must thus be dispelled.

Of course, full time work is not a choice for many women and parents. Not all women have equal access to long-term, full time work, while women of disadvantaged economic backgrounds have even less flexibility. Thus more attention to paid parental leaves and subsidized childcare would help us get to a better place for all mothers, fathers, and children throughout society.

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How can mothers win? Ending the bias against caretakers.

As we’ve seen, both women and men face challenges reconciling work-life integrity. Usually, individuals are forced to adjust their own behavior: share household burdens, manipulate supervisors’ perceptions, or just opt out entirely.

What makes this whole balancing process harder is that caretakers suffer a particular bias at work. In her seminar last week on “Reducing the Caretaker Penalty: Norms, Laws, and Organizational Policy,” Stanford University’s Shelley Correll demonstrated how mothers, for example, are paid less than both fathers and childless women---nearly 5-7% less per child, in fact. But it’s difficult to overcome this because of two absurd and paradoxical societal perceptions:

• The assumption that mothers are less committed to their office work
• The normative view that mothers should be more committed to their children than their office work-and if they’re not, they’re bad people.

If mothers try to work their way out of the caretaker bias, they’re seen as selfish, arrogant, and dominant, and are penalized accordingly. Basically, mothers can’t win!

So can laws change societal norms? Professor Correll explains how, yes, they can not only provide punitive protections but also create more symbolic social consensus that implies what’s right and wrong.

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) gives employees that have worked for over twelve months in an organization with more than 50 people the right to 12 weeks of unpaid leave per year. Just knowing about FMLA and other organizational leave policies positively affects how colleagues view mothers and other caretakers who take short leaves. Even a limited law that’s weakly enforced can promote gender equity.

If we enable workplace leave more reflexively, we can prep society for more openness, namely to the reality that all people---men, women, rich, poor---have and must honor responsibilities outside of the workplace. As Professor Correll put it, “work should be a verb, not a place,” and Best Buy’s management has pioneered Results Only Work Environments (ROWE), where employees are paid for results and output rather than the number of hours worked.

Convincing employers and supervisors of the merits of this kind of flexibility might be more difficult, because they may have legitimate concerns about their workforce. But these employers ought to keep two things in mind. One is that their own expectations of different groups---women caretakers, African Americans, etc---are often incorrectly biased, and these are biases that impede a fair and efficient workplace. Another is that more flexible work environments will mean longer-term retention of good workers.

Low- and hourly-wage workers and their employers face another challenge: their work is inherently based on time commitment, and already feels risky. Even if they can afford it financially, these workers don’t want to take FMLA because it will prejudice their employers upon return.

Accordingly, good laws are even more important in these cases, setting the norm for what is right.

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Why (and how) we shouldn't have it all

Debates over whether women should lean in, lean out, have it all or just some have been raging over the last few years, with few clear answers. Should women emulate men? Adjust what they’re doing to gain power? Opt out entirely?

At this week’s WAPPP Seminar on “Different Ways of Not Having It All: Work, Care, and Gender Change in the New Economy,” NYU Sociologist Kathleen Gerson suggests that the answers can’t, and shouldn’t be that simple.

While women have made tremendous strides in the workplace and at home, we’re entering a whole new economic era, where the boundaries between work and home, local and global job markets, and part and full-time work are all blurring---to say nothing of changing gender norms in most vocations.

Meanwhile, even household norms are changing, with more women working outside the home even through a child’s life, work tensions affecting marital relationships, and greater expectations of parental involvement throughout a child’s life.

As a result, both economics and home life are changing and becoming even less secure: careers aren't quite the linear, predictable paths they used to be, nor are household expectations of, and demands on both partners.

There are three main ways that people are thinking about these changes:

• “Neotraditional” arrangements, in which both partners work and are committed to one another, but one partner “specializes” in care, while the other “specializes” in breadwinning
• “Self-Reliance,” where, even in committed relationships, both partners work to provide money and care in equal doses---without counting on the other.
• and “Gender flexibility,” in which there is an egalitarian sharing of earning and caretaking, but a vague meaning of equality: care and breadwinning are responsibilities assigned not by gender, just what needs to be done

Both men and women would prefer gender-flexibility as an ideal arrangement. But in practice, women tend to fall back to more self-reliant positions, while men reflexively tend toward neotraditional arrangements. This is partly because men are still under the subtle yet profound pressure of the male breadwinner ideal: a man who can’t support his family is unmarriageable and “isn’t a man.” Even equality is seen as chivalrous: “equality means the woman has a choice; but I don’t.”

In practice, a third of people are “neotraditionalists,” with fathers left managing time-demanding jobs. About a third of people are “on their own,” and are left to rear children by themselves or without a committed partner. One of six couples have reversed traditional roles, with women providing more financially, but this leading to resentment in the relationship. And another sixth are “equal, but exhausted.”

At the end of the day, these choices are not about gender, but universal hopes to have a balanced life with predictable work and secure relationships---all permutations of which will require trade-offs. The erosion of job and relationship security are permanent conditions with which we must all contend; to do so we may have to redefine the responsibilities of being a man and a woman in the modern world.




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The Gender Pay Gap among Stockbrokers

Wharton professor Janice Fanning Madden proves once again that solid social science research can settle lawsuits and chip away at discrimination. Asked to testify in class-action law-suits of female stockbrokers against two large firms, she used company data to tease out the evidence of gender bias and demonstrate that the firms’ arguments had no basis in fact.

Stockbrokers are the highest paid sales occupation, yet it has the largest gender pay gap. Female stockbrokers earn 54-60% of their male counterparts. Since stockbroker compensation is based almost entirely on commission, the obvious explanation for the pay gap is that women simply generate fewer sales.

The trading firms were convinced that this was a matter of sales capacity – low-performing female stockbrokers stayed while low-performing males left, and women worked less intensely due to household responsibilities and other factors. Professor Madden proved their arguments wrong. Through statistical analysis of account records tied to each stockbroker, she demonstrated that when men and women received equivalent clients and accounts, they generated equivalent sales. Yet she found that on the whole women were being given inferior accounts, which led to lower commissions.

The point is not to accuse male managers of blatant sexism. In most cases, their biases were likely unconscious. Decision-making research demonstrates that people are bad at predicting performance, and that in instances where the workplace is overwhelmingly male, the manager is more likely to have a subjective “hunch” that a man might do better than a woman. So if women start off with inferior accounts, they will generate lower sales and become less and less likely to receive a lucrative account.  

The firms protested this explanation. They claimed that the better accounts went to more experienced brokers, who happened to be male, a disparity that would go away as the female workforce matured. That is where Dr. Fanning Madden really surprised them. The company records demonstrated that when a broker left, the managers redistributed more accounts to the newer, “hungrier” brokers, not those with more experience and an already heavy client base.

Thus both the “experience” and the “sales capacity” arguments of the financial giants fell apart, the lawsuits were settled and the women received substantial damage pay. Yet female stockbrokers are still earning less than men, unconscious biases are still shaping practice, and there is not enough pressure for systemic change. 

The challenge as I see it is to take powerful research about the causes of the pay gap beyond academia and federal court, and put it into the hands of managers, operations professionals and HR staff the world over.