S hasn't been her usual cheerful self for many months granted I only see her during calls where we are both required attendees and come on video. I wasn't sure what to make of it and with things as busy they have been for the both of us, I could not find a time to just connect with her for a chat. This has been a pattern with other women I have known at work. I can sense something is not right but since we work in different cities or even countries, making that wellness check is not something that happens without effort. We finally had a 1:1 a few days ago and I learned that S was leaving on maternity leave and by the way the conversation went it was not a given that she planned to stick around even if she returned.
There is a point of inflection in an employee's timeline at a job when they decide they have done enough, have not been recognized enough or even had their tribulations acknowledged. S has had a bit of all that I think in the last couple of years. Having the baby forces a natural pause to her rhythm and allows her to revaluate her options. S is a very smart and capable woman but she's not in a role where she can truly shine. After the call, I wondered how motherhood might make her see her job all that's wrong with it. It reminded me of an NYT article I had read a decade ago about how a baby is penalty to a woman's career and a bonus for a man's. The data speaks for itself in a sad way:
This bias is most extreme for the parents who can least afford it, according to new data from Michelle Budig, a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who has studied the parenthood pay gap for 15 years. High-income men get the biggest pay bump for having children, and low-income women pay the biggest price, she said in a paper published this month by Third Way, a research group that aims to advance moderate policy ideas. “Families with lower resources are bearing more of the economic costs of raising kids,” she said in an interview.
The explanation is simplistic but most likely true. It's probably also the reason, many men in leadership roles often include the number of years married to same woman in their introduction. When I first started seeing this as a pattern, I was confused - why does a random person at work need to know how long some guy has been married to a woman. I was not sure what I was meant to do with that data point. I did not hear women share this stat as often even though some of them could have been married just as long if not longer. This was detail you learned in more personal settings - at lunch or happy hour. It comes with detail that made the story memorable - how they first met and when they decided to marry and the best friend who is jeweler and made their rings. It was not just a stat that counted - years continuously married. For men it signals stable and reliable - for women probably not nearly as much
..much of the pay gap seems to arise from old-fashioned notions about parenthood. “Employers read fathers as more stable and committed to their work; they have a family to provide for, so they’re less likely to be flaky,” Ms. Budig said. “That is the opposite of how parenthood by women is interpreted by employers. The conventional story is they work less and they’re more distractible when on the job.”
For S and many women like her, the penalty could have started to incur as soon as they started dealing with morning sickness, moodiness and more that go along with pregnancy. They stop being their "usual selves" at work and it probably gets noticed.
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