A crippling gender pay gap. The motherhood penalty. A lack of flexible working. The fact that a quarter of women have been shamed or pressured to return to work early when taking time off for health issues. We know that when it comes to our careers, women – in particular, those with children – often face a host of challenges compared to our male counterparts.

However, according to research, women are having to contend with the motherhood penalty before they even decide whether to have kids or not.

According to charity Pregnant Then Screwed, mothers make £4.44 less per hour in weekly earnings than fathers. Worse still, mothers earned 43% less than fathers based on median weekly earnings, according to ONS data from January to March 2023. On top of that, earlier this year the Equality and Human Rights Commission estimated that as many as 54,000 new mothers each year lose their jobs due to maternity discrimination, despite pregnancy being a legally protected characteristic, and the picture that is painted remains pretty bleak.

But if you are a woman and you haven’t had children, you are often still facing the motherhood penalty. In fact, a third of employers admit to having avoided hiring women of childbearing age, meaning that your career is being impacted whether you choose to have kids or not. 

Research published in 2019 by the IZA Institute of Labour Economics suggested that women in their 30s who were married and childless were less likely to be called back by employers seeking part-time staff than almost any other female group. “Our conjecture is that employers consider childless but married women, at particular ‘risk’ of becoming pregnant,” the researchers wrote.

A further study by the University of Zurich in 2022 also found that managers may still see women without children as a hiring risk if they are of childbearing age, an occurrence they called a “maybe baby bias”. “Managers may believe that young women are risky investments given the anticipated costs of extended leave, workplace disruption or turnover resulting from new motherhood,” the researchers suggested. “We hypothesised that this perceived risk can translate into a reluctance to offer longer-term contracts to young women.”

Indeed, they asked 376 experienced managers to evaluate six female job applicant profiles. The resumes were identical in all conditions and the social media content indicated that all applicants were childfree. However, the applicants varied in age (30s vs. 40s) and their social media posts expressed either no interest in having children, openness to children or no information. As predicted, the female applicant in her 30s who expressed an openness to children in the future was assigned the most precarious employment opportunities by managers.

Clearly, women are caught in a double bind when it comes to motherhood and their careers: shamed for choosing not to have children, penalised for expressing a desire to. And unfortunately, it appears it’s just as bad for young, married women who never plan to become mothers as for those who do.

Images: Getty