NYT: Active fathers face the same workplace penalties as mothers.
Researchers have described the “motherhood penalty” for women in the work force. The Journal of Social Issues last year published three studies on the so-called flexibility stigma for men, which together leave little doubt that there is reason for men to fear reducing hours or taking time off for family reasons.
One of the studies was by Mr. Coltrane of the University of Oregon. It used data from 6,403 men in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and was the first major longitudinal study — tracking the same group of people over time — to show that taking time off for family reasons reduced men’s earnings, just as it reduced women’s earnings. When men reduced their hours for family reasons, they lost 15.5 percent in earnings over the course of their careers, on average, compared with a drop of 9.8 percent for women and 11.2 percent for men who reduced their hours for other reasons.
When men start diverging from the breadwinner role by taking time off or working fewer hours — or, as Mr. Coltrane puts it, “become active-enough parents and begin looking like what we think of as mothers” — they can be penalized.
Another study found that men who used flexible work arrangements, whether taking temporary family leave or working from home or part time, received worse job evaluations and lower hourly raises. The third found that men who requested family leave were at greater risk of being demoted or laid off because they were perceived to have negative traits that are used to stigmatize women, like weakness and uncertainty, not masculine ones like competitiveness and ambition.
“The implications are dire for gender equality in the workplace,” said Laurie A. Rudman, the lead author of the third study and a psychology professor at Rutgers. One solution, she said, is to recast family leave as a manly thing to do: “Change the conversation of what it means to be a 50-50 husband in order to underscore it takes amazing strength for men to do that — it’s the opposite of weak.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/upshot/paternity-leave-the-rewards-and-the-remaining-stigma.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=1&abt=0002&abg=0
