Debates around the pay gap that exists between men and women have been ongoing for numerous years now, and whilst the gap has gradually been shrinking, it is still expected to be several decades before it is closed completely.
A recent paper from the University of Arizona suggests that part of the problem might be in how parents are perceived at work when they’re single parents rather than part of a marriage. The work builds upon a widely established sociological fact that mothers and fathers are treated differently in the workplace, with fathers boosted as a result of their new status, and mothers penalized by up to 7% of their salary per child.
Researchers believe that this is due to stereotypes about each gender, with the role of breadwinner leading to a spike in fathers perception as they will become additionally focused on work, whilst those stereotypes position women as the caregiver position them in the opposite way.
The Arizona research ponders what happens when there is only one parent though. It found that when parents aren’t married, the motherhood penalty and fatherhood premium appears to vanish.
“The penalty does not apply for single mothers the way it applies for married mothers,” the authors say. “When a woman is known to be single and when she has children, then in addition to being a caregiver, she’s also a breadwinner. So, in addition to caregiving, she now also has to provide for her family and she has no one to fall back on. My research shows that single mothers are not perceived as less competent or less committed than single childless women, and they are not less likely to be hired or promoted compared to their childless counterparts. In other words, while the motherhood penalty holds for married mothers, it disappears in the subsample of single mothers.”
Marital status
Interestingly however, whilst single mothers don’t appear to be penalized, they also don’t enjoy the premium that married fathers enjoy. Alas, the same appears to be the case for single fathers, who lose out on their own premium.
“Single fathers, in addition to being breadwinners, are caregivers to their offspring,” the authors say. “Likely, this triggers an assumption that they are more focused on their family than a married father might be, which eliminates the fatherhood premium.”
The findings emerged after participants were asked to evaluate a number of job applications for an upper management position. The participants were made aware of each applicants’ gender, marital status and parental status, before being asked to evaluate each of the applicants via a series of questions.
“For the subsample of single mothers and single fathers, there’s no premium or penalty,” the authors explain, “which suggests that marital status operates as a strong status cue that, combined with gender and parenthood status, leads evaluators to make assumptions about one’s anticipated performance at work.”
Suffice to say, the findings emerged from a laboratory-based experiment so it is by no means certain that they will mirror the real world. The authors also appreciate that the single parents represented in the study were described as driven, ambitious and accomplished, which will have influenced how they were perceived by the participants. It does nonetheless present an interesting hypothesis that will hopefully be explored in more depth in future research.
