In many workplaces, childless, early career professional experience prejudgment by colleagues and supervisors who see them as potential future mothers and therefore a possible burden on the team if they were to become pregnant and take maternity leave.
Taken a step further, these “maybe baby” perceptions can have a significant impact on workplace relations, leading to early career women being ostracised, resented and disrespected by their colleagues. In turn, this can cause some women to consider quitting their jobs or even abandoning their chosen career paths altogether and switching industries.
In a recent study at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School, we sought to explore this phenomenon beyond simple anecdotal evidence, to measure and understand the treatment young women receive and suggest possible solutions.
Working with colleagues at the universities of Munich and Zurich, we used survey data taken at two points, one year apart, from 474 employees working in a range of disciplines at academic institutions in Switzerland.
Several previous studies have shown the many employment disadvantages facing women who become mothers. For example, they are viewed as less competent and are less likely to be hired than their male or childless counterparts, despite having equal qualifications.
However, our research found that actual motherhood is not necessarily a requirement for women to experience motherhood penalties. Indeed, merely the perception that childless women may at some point become pregnant – and therefore an “inconvenience” to their supervisors and colleagues – can lead them to experience mistreatment.
In our research we focused on a subtle form of mistreatment known as workplace incivility. Unlike overt bullying or blatant discrimination, incivility is inherently subtle and ambiguous yet its impact can be highly damaging both to the individual and to organisations through loss of promising talent.
It includes treatment such as being interrupted, ignored or spoken over, or having jokes made at the target’s expense.
From the surveys we conducted, we found that overall, women experienced more incivility than men. However, when we evaluated the individual’s parenthood status, we found that childless younger women reported 40 percent more incivility than childless men and 70 percent more incivility than women who had already become mothers.
When we evaluated the organization’s parental leave policies, we found that childless women were especially likely to report incivility when they worked in organisations that offered more maternal leave than paternal leave.
Moreover, among the early career childless women we surveyed, we found that the incivility they faced was associated with thoughts about leaving their careers. For example, a year after these experiences of workplace incivility, 20.5% of childless women working in organisations with generous maternity leave strongly agreed that they planned to leave the academic profession. We found that there was little gender differentiation in the source of the incivility, with both male and female colleagues directing incivility towards younger women.
Perhaps most surprisingly, we found that different organisational policies on maternal leave were a major influence on levels of incivility.
Specifically we found that childless women in organisations where the difference between maternity and paternity leave entitlement was greatest (a gap of between 28 and 34 weeks), experienced much higher levels of incivility than those in organisations where the difference was smaller.
This implies that whilst these policies were ostensibly intended to benefit professional women, they could also expose them to resentment and potential mistreatment from their coworkers.
Our findings suggest some possible solutions for both workers and employers.
First, supervisors and organisations can tackle resentment towards potential parents by fostering more inclusive workplace climates and clearly defined family-supportive policies such as home working or flexible working.
However, these must be backed up by clearly stated support or buy-in from senior management.
Such family-friendly signals generate benefits for potential parents and their colleagues. For example, by reducing employees’ worries and hesitations about disclosing pregnancy and/or plans for children.
This benefits individual health but also helps organisational planning to cover work absences by new mothers, which could reduce perceptions of inconvenience and feelings of resentment.
However, to truly foster more inclusive, family-supportive climates, a key step is to provide more equitable benefits for both men and women. Several organisations have already taken steps in this direction, creating benefits for new fathers, often in the form of broader policies that are available to either parent.
At the national level, Germany, Norway, Sweden and Denmark have also moved towards offering parental leave policies that are available to be shared by both parents. For countries such as Singapore, which are facing a declining birth rate, this could be a step to reducing the many challenges young couples face in starting a family.
In theory, this shared leave approach would make it less clear to supervisors and employees exactly how long a young female or a male employee might be away from work in the case of a pregnancy. This would help reduce the lop-sided “inconvenience” and “maybe baby” expectations for women.
In practice however it would be important to support this policy by actively encouraging men to take it up. This could include senior management explicitly supporting fathers who exercise parental leave options and with male leaders in organisations doing their part and setting an example as role models.
Finally, whilst the onus should not be on the targets themselves to correct others’ biases, early career women can proactively highlight – and ideally, extinguish – inaccurate expectations about their plans for children and/or preferences regarding their career.
This early intervention, being clear and open about family plans rather than leaving it until the last minute, can help mitigate incivility by targeting unfair and often inaccurate “maybe baby” expectations.