Recently, in researching parental/family leave, I came across a worrying concept: the fatherhood bonus.
In an article published in the Third Way, sociologist Michelle Budig looks at the fatherhood bonus alongside and its partner concept, the motherhood penalty, and explores some of the reasons that they occur in workplaces across the US.
Of course, the wage gap between men and women was familiar to me, but Budig outlines how the mere fact of parenthood may play a significant role in influencing that gap:
Unmarried women earn 96 cents to an unmarried man’s dollar, and childless women (including married and unmarried) earn 93 cents on a childless man’s dollar. In contrast, wives and mothers fare far less well. Even among full-time workers, married mothers with at least one child under age 18 earn 76 cents on a married father’s dollar. Single mothers earn 83.1 cents to a single custodial father’s dollar (that single moms are much less likely to be employed full-time relative to single dads is masked by this estimate among full-time workers). These figures show that married mothers of minor children experience the largest wage gaps. (emphasis mine)
When I first mentioned the fatherhood bonus to my wife, she laughed.
“You were promoted right after they found out you were going to be a dad!” she said. “You didn’t think that had something to do with it?”
Somewhat ashamed that this observation had escaped me, a quick review of my career timeline confirmed her claim. Indeed, I had been promoted a few months after announcing to the firm that my wife and I were expecting. It would seem that I was, indeed, a recipient of the worrying fatherhood bonus.
Partly because I entirely cannot follow Budig’s methodology, I won’t attempt to walk through the step-by-step of her investigations, other than to note that, yes, it seems likely that I was an unwitting beneficiary of the fatherhood bonus. I’ll let Budig close it out:
In summary, our findings point to significant wage bonuses for fatherhood that cannot be explained by differential selection into fatherhood on factors that lead to higher wages. Moreover, this bonus cannot be explained by fathers’ or their partners’ changed work hours following the birth of a child. Our findings show that fatherhood bonuses are ever-larger for more privileged men. This, in combination with past findings of employer preferential treatment of fathers, suggests that fatherhood is a valued characteristic of employers, signaling perhaps greater work commitment, stability, and deservingness. Men’s traits that are valued in organizational settings combine with fatherhood to produce larger earnings bonuses. White (and sometimes Latino) married college graduates in professional occupations receive the largest fatherhood bonuses. Notably, none of these factors serve to alter the fatherhood bonus among African-Americans, which remains the lowest of all racial/ethnic groups in every analysis. In summary, men who are either better positioned or more valued due to their race/ethnicity, human capital, and professional standing receive a larger earnings bonus for fatherhood. (emphases mine)
As a white cisgender male, the second bold section is troubling. It represents yet another instance of not-so-subtle systemic racism, embedded into the structure and flow of our careers.
Unsurprisingly, a very different dynamic emerges when Budig examines the motherhood penality.
While Budig suggests, as quoted above, that “fatherhood is a valued characteristic for employers, signaling perhaps greater work commitment, stability, and deservingness,” this is emphatically not the default view for mothers in the workplace.
Ideas of what make a “good mother,” a “good father,” and an “ideal worker” matter. If mothers are supposed to focus on caring for children over career ambitions, they will be suspect on the job and even criticized if viewed as overly focusing on work. Correll et al found that mothers face discrimination even when they demonstrate competence and commitment. Evaluators viewed highly successful (on the job) mothers as less likeable, less warm, and more interpersonally hostile than non-mothers. Even when mothers break the stereotype of prioritizing family over work, they face discrimination in the workplace. The opposite is true for fathers.
Budig highlights a double bind for working mothers in the US: their standing in the workplace suffers regardless of whether they emphasize their caregiving role or their work.
In conclusion, she suggest that change must happen at a policy level if we are serious about addressing the wage gap. She cites evidence that longer parental leave policies may not be an effective policy solution, offering instead that publicly funded childcare (something private companies, obviously, cannot implement) shows some potential in other countries as a solution.
In considering the role of nationalized work-family policies and the motherhood penalty, our research indicates that publicly funded childcare, particularly for children aged 0 to 2 years, is associated with smaller penalties, while extended parental leaves (up to 3 years in Germany), are associated with larger wage penalties for mothers.
Taylor Coe 