The Mommy Track

[astra_nomer]

I'm a bit late to this news tidbit, but there's this study that's been recently published about how working mothers fare in the job market. It seems that you can draw up the perfect resume for a woman, but if you insert a single line in it, about being a PTA officer, suddenly you don't land the interview or get the job or earn as much money as you would have otherwise. (see also.)

Relatedly, having children can be a real liability for women hoping to get tenure, whereas it seem to be an advantage for men.

Consider, also, that astronomy is small enough a field that pretty much anywhere I apply, there will be at least one person who can say, "Dr. Nomer? Yeah, I hear she has two kids." So really, there's no sense in hiding the fact that I'm a mother, even if it doesn't show up on my resume. I also wonder how much of that factors into my big, fat, and growing pile of rejection letters.

I wish I could change these things. You know, shake some people up and make them aware of their unconscious biases, maybe slap them around if they're conscious (the biases, I mean). But at the same time, I don't want to create bad feelings, because it really is such a small field and my position in it is precarious enough as it is. Raising a ruckus will probably just grant me a "shrill feminist" label, and who wants one of those in their department, spoiling the good-old-boy atmosphere? I guess I'll just have to be a quiet, bitter feminist until I get tenure, then all hell can break loose.

EDIT: You can find the study by Correll et al. here (p. 1297), but I don't have permissions to see it.

Comments

[desireearmfeldt]

I'd love to see more detail about the research design of that study--for one thing, "the ideal resume" is not a generic item, it differs depending on the job you're applying for, and presumably they ought to be controlling for different types of jobs, but then getting a reasonable sample size seems tricky...

Anyway, not to say I doubt the conclusions, necessarily, but the social-science research geek in me wants to know how they got them. :) (The one about tenure goes into more detail about what the numbers are and where they came from.)

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

The line about "And, just for good measure, they were also judged more harshly for tardiness" makes me think that it wasn't an experiment being run in the wild (heck, that'd run afoul of experimentation-on-humans rules at this point, wouldn't it?), but that they brought in people and showed them a bunch of resumes for a hypothetical job, and asked them questions about how much they'd offer people or how much they'd penalize them for coming in late, or the like.

[marcusmarcusrc.livejournal.com]

In fact, they brought in a bunch of undergraduates to judge resumes etc.

I'm not sure if this makes it better (you hope that as undergrads get older they'll get a more realistic view of the world) or worse (if the next generation of CEO's are this way, that means it will be even longer until we reach equality...)

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

I found the article online, but I don't have permissions to see it, sadly. (See edit, above)