The strongest and most open form of gender bias today often is the bias against mothers. Fathers who play an active role in family care may encounter severe bias as well. Common patterns are described below.

Negative Competence and Commitment Assumptions

Mothers are 79% less likely to be hired, 100% less likely to be promoted, offered $11,000 less in salary for the same position, and held to higher performance and punctuality standards than women with identical resumes but no children, according to one study.[1] An earlier study found that, whereas “businesswomen” are seen as highly competent, alongside businessmen, “housewives” are lumped alongside the elderly, blind, “retarded,” and disabled (to use the words tested by the researchers), and seen as high in warmth but low in competence.[2] Motherhood tends not to affect lesbians negatively, probably due to the (inaccurate) assumption that lesbians do not have children.[3]

I had a baby, not a lobotomy.[4]

If you...have your child on campus, colleagues who recognize you when you are by yourself now only see you as a walking uterus and ignore you.[5]

Role Incongruity

The "good mother" is seen as someone always available to her children[6]; the ideal worker as someone always available for work[7].

A professor was denied tenure despite the unanimous support of her dean and tenure committee. The provost allegedly described her decision to “stop the clock” as “a red flag,” and the department chair wrote that “as the mother of two infants she had responsibilities that were incompatible with those of a full-time academician.” A reported tentative settlement of nearly $500,000 resolved the resulting lawsuit.[8]

Prescriptive Bias: What mothers should do

Prescriptive bias, which polices mothers into homemaker roles, can either be hostile:

A fellow faculty member--who was eligible to participate on one professor's tenure committee--told the professor to stop worrying about tenure; just go home and have more babies.[9]

or benevolent:

A number of years ago I had an opportunity to do this training program that’s two years long. And my department head at the time said, I don’t think you should do this before you have tenure. But looking back on it now, I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I had a really small child and he thought that time commitment was going to be too much. I was really mad because at least I thought it should have been up to me, but he made the decision.[10]

Bias Avoidance

Professors often try to avoid maternal wall bias either by not having children, or by hiding that they do: 40% of academics say they have fewer children than they wanted.[11]

I have been very concerned if I have to run and get my son from childcare that it is going to be frowned upon, and try to the best of my ability to make that all look like it doesn’t exist.

When one assistant professor asked for a part-time tenure track appointment, her department chair said, “No, you don’t want to do that.”[12]

Leniency Bias

Leniency bias is when objective rules are applied rigidly to mothers but to no one else.

I came and I taught a full load my first year and that was considered normal and then, all [of] the three men who were hired after me all got these big course reductions because "Oh they have to make this transition." It's like, oh gee, and I didn't somehow[?]