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If you’re a working mother, you may have struggled with expressing the fact that you are a mom in certain, or all, professional settings. Like many, you may have felt that motherhood may be perceived as a career hindrance, and not an asset. You may have even experienced situations in which your professionalism, competence and/or abilities were put in question due to the fact that you have children to care for. For instance, so working moms have admitted being fearful of revealing they had children during interviews for fear of not getting the job. Others have even suffered through losing a promotion or having their professional advancement and growth stunted, often resulting in what is known as the motherhood penalty.
The motherhood penalty encompasses a host of various problems working mothers face in their careers after having children. This penalty is also unfair punishment for mothers, based on inaccurate, biased perceptions of mothers, including the view that motherhood renders women less productive for instance. Men, on the other hand, tend to be professionally rewarded after becoming fathers, in a phenomenon known as the “dad bonus”. This not only affects women’s career trajectories, but also their earnings, promotions, performance evaluations and employment prospects. Yet, the reality is much different from these false, negative, but unfortunately widely-held perceptions. According to the 2019 research by Berlin Cameron entitled “Let’s put the motherhood penalty to rest”, the skills mothers develop after having children are essential to the workplace.
In Power Moms, author Joann Lublin says it so well: “Motherhood transforms many women into better leaders.” In these modern times where parents are not only time-starved, but also limited in key resources such as childcare and parental leave, mothers have no other choice but to become extremely effective at managing priorities well, multi-tasking and delegating. In addition, they are also more apt at exhibiting values that have been proven to benefit organizations such as innovation, creativity, empathy, and crisis management, to cite a few.
As a working mom, you may know this all too well. However, faced with various professional ceilings, walls and barriers in your way to career growth and fulfillment, it may be difficult to take advantage of your maternal skills in the workplace. This is the message I’m often getting from moms and others, who are certainly aware of the assets they bring to the workplace, yet struggle with maximizing these effectively.
Here are three strategies that may help:
Highlight your motherhood transferrable skills as a leader
Motherhood also breeds transferrable leadership skills, such as organization, project management, crisis management, multi-tasking, compassion, and empathy, to cite a few. These are all invaluable skills in the workplace. Unfortunately, they are also skills that many working mothers hesitate to highlight in their professional experience.
While it can be intimidating, especially in certain professional settings and environments, to talk about the advantages of being a working mother, it can be a game-changer. Too few of us dare to challenge the negative stereotypes plaguing working moms, instead preferring hiding behind a false sense of safety in silence. Let’s dare to pinpoint all the skills, assets and intuition we bring to the workplace, including those that come with being a working mom.
Seek alignment
As much as we may try, certain professional environments are just not aligned with thriving as working moms. Often, these are environments heavy with gender bias and stereotypes, whose culture does not allow for working mothers to grow, develop and succeed. This is where alignment matters. Being aligned with your organization, department or business unit is crucial in order to be impactful.
How can we better seek alignment as working mothers? The interviewing process is a great start. Let’s remember that we are not the only ones being interviewed, but that we are also interviewing the organization itself. This, in turn, is a valuable opportunity to take the cultural pulse of the company or business, and assess its openness to and views of working mothers. We can also check for metrics such as statistics of working mothers in leadership for instance.
In our careers, we can and should continue to seek alignment by continuously assessing the pulse of the culture we work in, and determining if it is still a right for us. This means also being ready to pivot, adjust and even transition as needed.
Allyship is key
Being an ally to working moms, and seeking allies ourselves, also goes a long way towards ensuring that more mothers are in leadership seats. In this regard, we are all leaders in our own right, regardless of the position we may occupy. This also means we can all serve as allies to women in leadership positions, or moving towards leadership positions in our organizations.
How can we do this? It can start with amplifying working mothers’ voices, joining causes on behalf of working moms, or simply supporting a mother at work. However, serving as an ally does not preclude us from also seeking and recognizing allies. This can go from seeking mentors and sponsors at work, to recognizing the subtle signs of someone who is showing up as an ally, through their direct or indirect support, leadership and/or guidance.
All in all, it’s refreshing and hopeful to see that views on motherhood as a hindrance to a purposeful and fulfilling career, are changing. The Let’s put the motherhood penalty to rest” study also outlines the promising fact that younger generations are more likely to equate motherhood with leadership. Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing “Great Resignation”, as well as the work revolution that is taking shape, are all re-defining working motherhood in terms of increased authenticity, purpose and fulfillment.
All in all, while there is much work to be done when it comes to working motherhood and leadership, we are hopeful. Most importantly, we are moving towards the direction of asserting authentic leadership as mothers, rather than hiding or even worse, denying the precious asset we bring to the table of work, both individually and collectively.
In this episode of the podcast, in honor of Mental Health Awareness, I’m chatting about the negative mental health effects of gender inequality. Research shows these mental health effects disproportionately impact working women and moms.
I also share tips to cope with these negative effects, and continue to expand the conversation as working women and moms.
The impact of gender discrimination on a Woman’s Mental Health:https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(20)30055-9/fulltext
Thanks for Listening!
Thanks so much for tuning in and listening to this week’s episode! If you enjoyed this week’s episode, please share it by using the social media at the bottom of this post!
Also, leave me a review for the TCS podcast on Apple Podcasts !
In episode 34 of the podcast, I’m starting a series on “leading like women”. Here, I’m chatting about what characterizes women’s leadership, and how to embrace it to lead authentically and powerfully.
This podcast refers to research from the Business Journal from the Wharton school of the University of Pennsylvania: “The Masculine and Feminine Sides of Leadership and Culture: Perceptions vs Reality”.
If you have any insights as to this episode, please email us at corporate@thecorporatesister.com.
Thanks for Listening!
Thanks so much for tuning in and listening to this week’s episode! If you enjoyed this week’s episode, please share it by using the social media at the bottom of this post!
Also, leave me a review for the TCS podcast on Apple Podcasts !
During a workshop I had the pleasure of leading on working with purpose, most of the women in the group listed the same or similar strengths. Among these, were innovation, creativity, effective crisis management, to cite just a few. As we looked at each other, we not only realized we bring similar assets to the workplace, but that these assets are also some of the most, if not the most, important in businesses and organizations today. Yet, what we also realized, is that many, if not most of us, do not value these assets as much as we should. Instead, we tend to place much more emphasis on traditionally masculine leadership qualities such as assertiveness, competitiveness, or ego-driven dominance, for instance.
Research and experience both show there are definitely more “masculine” and “feminine” styles of leadership. These are as much fueled by employees’ perceptions, as they are by the reality of the individual leadership styles of men and women in the workplace. While most of the differences in leadership between men and women are attributed to the social construct of gender, many are also due to how we perceive how men and women lead. While male leaders tend to be associated with strength, arrogance, intelligence, and power, to cite a few qualifiers, women leaders tend to be associated with multi-tasking, empathetic, compassionate and collaborative.
At the end of the day, it’s really about what we think about leadership rather than what leadership can truly accomplish. As a matter of fact, role congruity, or the expectation that people will act according to their gender, changes how leaders are perceived regardless of how effective they are. As a result, women tend to be considered less effective as leaders, and
tend to be more influenced into adopting more of a masculine style of leadership, which is not effective either as not aligned with their natural skills and talents…
So how are women leaders affected by gender-based perceptions of leadership to lead effectively? The answer, or least one of the answers, lies in self-awareness. Women leaders need to cultivate a stronger and deeper awareness of their style of leadership, in conjunction with the culture of their organization. This also means assessing their strengths, opportunities for improvement, opportunities and potential threats, akin to an individual SWOT analysis. However, the fit between women leaders and their organization’s culture is an important factor to consider. As self-aware as women leaders can be, without a proper fit with their organization’s culture, their effectiveness is limited.
Organizational fit can be measured by the alignment of the mission and values of the company, with that of its leaders and employees. Values such as integrity, corporate citizenship, and diversity and inclusion for instance, tend to foster more gender-inclusive styles of leadership. According to Stanford University’s research, organizational culture is measured against two dimensions, including values, as well as how these values are distributed throughout the organization, also known as value crystallization.
For women leaders, at the end of the day, this represents a precious, albeit still underestimated, opportunity to lead as themselves. To lead with increased self-awareness, according to their values, and with a better cultural fit. In other words, to lead like women…
