Beyond the motherhood penalty: Evidence of a (potentially race-based) parenthood boost in workplace evaluations

Abstract

According to previous research, people more readily question the competence of, and express greater discrimination against, women (vs. men) who are described as parents in the workplace. In the present manuscript, we sought to examine whether the magnitude of this bias, which is referred to as the motherhood penalty, would be moderated by whether the women and men in question are Black rather than White. To explore this possibility, we conducted four large-scale replication attempts of well-known studies on the motherhood penalty (three of Cuddy, Fiske, & Glick, 2004, reported in-text; one of Heilman & Okimoto, 2008, reported in the online supplement). Across replication attempts, we manipulated not just target employees' parenthood statuses and gender groups, but also their racial groups. To our surprise, results from these replication attempts—as well as those from an internal meta-analysis (N = 4742)—revealed no evidence of a motherhood penalty. Instead, we found evidence of a parenthood boost: a tendency for people to more positively evaluate employees who are described as parents than employees who are not. Moreover, while parenthood-boost magnitudes did not vary by employees' gender groups, there was some evidence that they varied by employees' racial groups, with White parents receiving larger boosts than Black parents. Overall, these findings suggest that the motherhood penalty may no longer emerge in single-shot evaluative contexts. Indeed, there may be contexts in which parenthood now conveys evaluative advantages to both women and men in the workplace, with potential racial differences in the magnitude of those advantages.