Getting Even by Evelyn F. Murphy

Author:Evelyn F. Murphy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781416560456
Publisher: S&S
Published: 2005-08-25T10:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER9

Working While Mother: The Mommy Penalty

A little over four years ago, my wife, Cheryl, and I announced to the world, through our family and friends, that we were expecting our first child. It was truly one of the proudest moments of our lives. Included in that list of friends was my wife’s employer. However, within a week of the “good news,” she was terminated from her employment because her boss feared that she might not return from maternity leave.

—Samuel E. Joyner, Tulsa Law Journal, Spring 20011

One Virginia employer fired a woman after she gave birth, reasoning that “she was no longer dependable since she had delivered a child; that [her] place was at home with her child; that babies get sick sometimes and [she] would have to miss work to care for her child; and that [the employer] needed someone more dependable.”

—Bailey v. Scott-Gallaher, Inc., 253 Va. 121 (Sup. Ct. 1997)2

For the past ten years, public discussion about working women’s careers has been shorthanded into a single phrase: the “mommy track.” Women—especially those in high-end careers—are said to “choose” to drop out rather than run themselves to death on the gerbil wheel of corporate advancement. They’d rather oversee homework than head count. They’d rather take their children to piano lessons than take a meeting. This simplistic, outdated explanation is a media favorite, making it into the influential New York Times Magazine twice in recent years: once in 1998 and again (this time on its cover) in 2003.3 But is this how women themselves see the “mommy track”?

Perhaps some do—especially those with husbands so wealthy that, even if the marriage is one of the 49 percent that ends in divorce, the woman and her child are guaranteed a good cushion for years to come. But most of the women I’ve spoken to discovered that they had been “mommy-tracked” without being asked. When they got pregnant or had a child, these women found they were no longer considered for promotion—because, without asking, their managers automatically assumed that the new moms would soon be working part-time, would refuse to travel overnight, or would no longer show up reliably at important meetings. Or when these women returned from maternity leave, they discovered that they were kept off important (read: promotion-track) projects, since managers assumed their “work-family conflict” would slow them down. And if they did ask to work part-time for a while, their salaries and career possibilities were penalized far out of proportion to the time they put into their kids. When they returned to full-time work, their salaries were lower than when they’d left.

Getting Even has noted before how mothers get held back unfairly. In addition to looking at winning lawsuits about other basic forms of sex discrimination—such as refusal to hire or unequal pay—chapter 5, (“Plain Old Discrimination”) included examples of women who had sued and won court awards or settlements after charging that they had been shunted aside, demoted, or fired when employers realized they were pregnant, a complaint that EEOC

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