Doctoral Dissertation Research: Parenting and Employment Outcomes

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The proposed dissertation investigates how information about partnership status (married or single) impacts workplace outcomes for mothers and fathers. Previous studies have found that due to lower perceived competence and commitment, mothers are less likely to be hired and promoted; they also reap lower starting salaries than working fathers and childless workers. Such negative outcomes for mothers are known as the motherhood penalty. In contrast, fathers experience a boost in starting salaries as well as positive competence and commitment evaluations, known as the fatherhood bonus. Findings of previous research, however, focus primarily on married mothers and fathers. The proposed research seeks to examine the mechanism of workplace bias by comparing cultural assumptions about single mothers' and fathers' expected workplace performance to that of married parents. The proposed research is designed to test an argument that when the roles of caregiving and breadwinning are combined in one person - a single parent - employers' performance expectations for employee parents should be less affected by a parent's gender. Therefore, both the motherhood penalty and the fatherhood premium should diminish. The above predictions will be tested in a controlled laboratory experiment. In the experiment, paid undergraduate volunteers will rate a pair of ostensibly real (but actually fictitious) candidates for a job position. The two candidates will be equally qualified, of the same gender (male or female) and same parental status (has children or no information about children), varying only on partnership status (married or single). The experiment proposed here will recreate an evaluative setting where people make decisions about workplace outcomes in a highly controlled environment, allowing researchers to separate the effects of gender, parenthood, and partnership status on employment outcomes. One of the main intellectual contributions of this research is examining the role partnership status plays in sustaining or changing gendered assumptions about parenthood and workplace performance. Understanding how bias is produced and sustained is the first and critical step in eliminating it and increasing tolerance and equality at the workplace. Social change in this area can be gradually achieved by institutional agents having access to research findings and educating employers about hidden biases in order to reduce or prevent them. Eliminating bias should serve employers by increasing the pool of highly qualified candidates. Most importantly, uncovering the dynamics of discrimination and seeking to reduce it should greatly benefit those with less socially valued characteristics - women, single parents, and caregivers in general.