I have a client who erases all evidence of her children when she attends an off-site meeting, meets with a new customer or interviews for a new job.
She sweeps her desk clear of family photos, removes screen savers and desktop photos featuring her progeny and has even considered removing her wedding ring.
She's one of the thousands, if not tens of thousands, of women who came back into the workforce after having her first child with her head hung low and her hat in her hand.
"I know I accepted a lower salary," she told me when we first spoke, "because I'd been out of the workforce for two years and I was looking for a position compatible with motherhood."
She laughs at that second reason because she's a workplace superstar with an Ivy League education, a MacArthur grant and a perfect GRE score in her back pocket.
The "position compatible with motherhood" is in the executive ranks of a Fortune 50 corporation where the hours, while flexibly timed, are long and the work as demanding as it gets.
Having negotiated her compensation package way past parity, she continues to send me links to stories about high-flying working mothers.
Like the one about the corporate executive who said the only way to achieve work-life balance was to have more children because then you're required to make both family and work-life work.
The Mother Penalty and Gender Boundaries
I've been writing about working mothers this week and last because NPR and The New York Times have both recently covered the "motherhood penalty" that creates a 7 to 14% wage gap between childless career women (like me) and career women who are also mothers (like my client).
Yesterday, I wondered out loud why working mothers seemed to make everyone, particularly employers, so angry.
Jezebel, picking up the earlier question - why mothers suffer a wage penalty - speculated it was "confirmation bias" - that "employers just assume moms will be shitty workers, and every time they need time off for any reason, their preconceived notions are confirmed."
Jezebel was right on confirmation bias.
More fundamentally, however, is the violation of gender role boundaries that causes the impression that moms will be inattentive workers, and turns up the heat of employer and co-worker anger against working mothers.
The gender boundary theory comes from an article cited by commenter, Curt Rice, Pro Rector (Vice President) for Research & Development (prorektor for forskning og utvikling) at the University of Tromsø - Getting a Job: Is there a Motherhood Penalty.
It seems that the cultural attitudes toward motherhood and work are inherently contradictory.
While women with children are expected to "engage in 'intensive' mothering that prioritizes meeting the needs of dependent children above all other activities," the "ideal worker" is expected to be "unencumbered by competing demands and be 'always there' for his or her employer."
The story I told in yesterday's post - about my working into the early morning hours while my working mother associate left the office to pick up her child - perfectly (and somewhat embarrassingly) illustrates the tension.
As The Motherhood Penalty explains,
According to this 'ideal worker' belief, the best worker is the 'committed' worker who demonstrates intensive effort on the job through actions that appear to sacrifice all other concerns for work . . . Examples include a willingness to drop everything at a moment's notice for a new work demand, to devote enormous hours and 'face time' at work, and to work late nights or weekends.
Although everyone I've ever worked with knows that "face time" and long hours are not necessarily or even usually associated with productivity, "they function as a cultural sign of the effort component" of quality work performance.
If the mother is behaving as she should, she cannot also be an "ideal worker."
And mothers who are not behaving as they should piss everyone off because they're our mothers and they're supposed to take care of us dammit.
Devaluation is the Evil Twin of Work-Life Balance
This tension between the "rightful" role of mothers and the supposed characteristics of the "ideal worker" has created the monster known as "work-life balance."
As I've noted before, those AmLaw100 firms with the highest work-life balance scores have the lowest number of women in the equity partnership ranks.
According to The Motherhood Penalty, this result follows gender role discrimination like night follows day.
"Some work-family policies that are intended to ameliorate the effects of motherhood on workplace outcomes," write the authors, "may actually limit the career mobility and wage of women who take advantae of them by making motherhood status highly salient."
My client who sweeps her office clean of reminders that she's a mother, understands in her gut what the researchers know from data collected in the field - "mothers employed in professional and managerial jobs who participated in programs such as telecommuting experienced lower wage growth compared with otherwise similar mothers who avoided such programs."
My Own "Ideal Workyness"
Sometimes you have to pull your own covers off to make a point.
I can't tell you how many times I've told the mother-picking-up-her-children vs. Vickie-working-all-night story. It's not that the story is untrue. It's simply not exemplary of the entirety of my work life nor of the work-life of the mothers with whom I worked.
In that, the story is an untruthful representation of the general state of things.
Our unconscious biases do funny things to us. But the unfunniest thing they do is make us build up our positive self-image at the expense of others.
I have worked long hours throughout my career. I still do. And I still owe my mother a telephone call from last week. She explains in her voice mail message that she knows "how busy" I am and doesn't want to "pull me away from my work," but she'd really like to hear from me.
There were two husbands before this one who were predictably less kind in their "understanding" of my "situation" while they were married to me. And during the dark periods following separation and during divorce proceedings I was a pretty inattentive and less than exemplary worker.
Not only that, but I wasted a lot of face time, particularly during those years when I had no one to go home to at night. If it didn't matter when I got home, I could afford to blow an hour hanging out in someone else's office shooting the breeze about law firm politics, that year's Presidential race, or even how the Lakers were doing.
Had I chosen the far more difficult path of combining career with motherhood, I would have been forced to work in a more focused manner, to organize myself and my working teams better, and to get my work done between, say, 9 a.m. and 8 p.m. instead of between 10 a.m. and one in the morning.
The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and others are the tales that form not only our character, but also the world in which we want to live. I, personally, will never again tell a work-related story in which I, the diligent worker, stayed up all night while someone's mother left the office to pick them up at the sitters.
I'm sorry about that. I hope my remorse will find a place in the hearts of other women of my generation who too often divided themselves up into mothers and not-mothers, ideal workers and supposedly inattentive ones, the successful and the not-so-much.
And for that, I'd like to thank everyone who's ever written on this topic and shared their working mother experiences in the pages of a book, a magazine, an academic journal or a blog post.
We can create a better world together. It begins right here in our own hearts.
How you, the working mother, can avoid the "motherhood penalty," later this week.
