In the quest to have it all, a career and a family, some women are being left behind, according to a new study featured in the Harvard Business Review.
The study found that stay-at-home moms returning to work were half as likely to receive a job interview than women who had been unemployed for the same period of time. Similarly, stay-at-home dads were around half as likely to get a job interview than unemployed men.
“Given that employers have rigid expectations for employees to dedicate themselves fully to work, violating these ideal worker norms by demonstrating a prioritization of family evokes a moral evaluation of applicants’ work-family choices,” UNC researcher and assistant professor of sociology Katherine Weisshaar said in her study. “Potential employers thus perceive opting out as indicating lower dedication to work and, as a result, view opt out applicants as less worthy of a job.”
Employers’ stigma of stay-at-home parents finds its way inside many career paths, including those of professors at universities and in parental leave policies.
Johna Register-Mihalik, an assistant professor of exercise and sport science, had a positive experience with UNC’s parental leave policies when she took leave for a semester after her son was born last year and a few years before that with her daughter. However, she said some faculty members in other departments have a more difficult time taking time off and coming back to work.
“It's a hard time even though it's a really happy time,” Register-Mihalik said. “Now you are kind of a new person. For me, with each kid, I felt I had grown as a person and I was a little bit of a different person and I had to learn a little bit about who I was and how that fit into a really wonderful but high-paced work environment.”
The length of paid parental leave for both mothers and fathers depends on the faculty’s department, organization and whether they are nine or 12-month faculty and on the tenure-track at UNC. Professors can also elect to pause their tenure track and come back to it with no penalty, said Assistant Provost for Academic Personnel Ann Lemmon. Lemmon also said when hiring new faculty members, search committees prioritize accomplishments over employment gaps.
“We tell them you want to look at what the person's accomplished,” Lemmon said. “You don't want to look at how old they are. You don't want to look at how young they are. You don't want to look at necessarily how long it took them to get there. You want to look at what it is they've done.”
To Register-Mihalik, employment gaps used to take care of one’s family can be necessary in bonding with your children.
