Cultural Schemas and the Flexible Worker Motherhood Penalty: Meanings About Mothers Who Work from Home

• In Event: 50220 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 10: Remote Work

Abstract

Cultural schemas—shared mental representations of role identities—are frequently invoked to explain why working mothers face increased labor market discrimination (Correll, Benard, and Paik 2007), but empirical measures of these schemas themselves remain scarce. In this paper, we directly measure the cultural schema of “working mother” using evaluation, potency, and activity (EPA) ratings collected from American cultural informants. These data show that, relative to “mother,” labeling a woman as a working mother depresses perceived goodness and power in ways consistent with the discrimination-based motherhood penalty. We then expand this approach to test whether flexible work arrangements, specifically working from home, mitigate or exacerbate the penalty. We find that “mother who works from home” elicits even greater declines in perceptions of of goodness, power, and activity compared to conventional “working mother” stimulus." Paired with evidence from simulations that situate "working mothers" and "mothers who work from home" in of workplace interaction events, we find that flexible work may intensify role conflict and its consequences in the minds of observers and may deepen the motherhood penalty for women who work remotely. By operationalizing cultural schemas and documenting the magnified stigma attached to mothers who work remotely, this study clarifies the mechanism behind well-known findings that mothers are systematically disadvantaged in hiring, pay, and promotion. Moreover, it highlights a pressing need to examine how newly common workplace formats once presumed beneficial to working parents may inadvertently reinforce gendered disadvantages when filtered through persistent cultural meanings.

Authors

• Joseph M. Quinn, University of South Carolina-Columbia

• Aaron McLeod, University of South Carolina-Columbia