Many parents love to brag about their children. Some even note their children's existence on their resumes. Perhaps they shouldn't.
According to research presented by two Cornell University sociologists at a recent Wharton conference, mothers suffer when competing for jobs against similarly qualified fathers and childless men and women. The conference, entitled "Careers and Career Transitions: New Evidence for a New Economy," was organized by Wharton's Center for Human Resources and sponsored by career transitions firm DBM.
Additional research presented at the conference offered interesting observations on another group in the workplace -- smokers. According to scholars from Columbia University and Barnard College, smokers are paid less on average than other workers. The researchers suggest that employers may be right to pay smokers less because people who smoke may be less willing to invest time and effort in career advancement than nonsmoking colleagues.
Beyond their exploration of wages and workplace dynamics, the two papers seem dissimilar, but both try to sift through a stubborn problem in human-resource economics: Some people make more money than others and, even after controlling for factors like education and experience, it is often not clear why. Supervisors are usually willing to provide justifications for individual workers. But at the level of aggregate data, the disparities remain a puzzle.
Fatherhood Helps; Motherhood Doesn't
Shelley Correll and Stephen Benard, the Cornell sociologists, believe discrimination against mothers may play a role. They set out to test their hypothesis with an experiment.
They created resumes and human-resource department memos for candidates for an executive-level marketing job in a communications startup. The resumes contained effectively identical qualifications.
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