Making firefighters deployable

Based on prior work on the motherhood penalty, the chapter predicts that when information about competence and commitment is moderately ambiguous, mothers will experience status discrimination. It also explores whether normative discrimination causes successful mothers to be held to stricter standards. The chapter presents a discussion on the results of a laboratory study in which participants evaluated a pair of job applications for a midlevel marketing job to determine whether mothers face normative discrimination when they give overwhelming evidence of competence and commitment to paid work. The study manipulates applicant sex category, parental status, and level of ambiguity of past workplace performance. The chapter adds the main effect of participant sex category, and its interaction with the motherhood penalty interaction, to the regression model to determine whether the results varied by participant sex category. It demonstrates that discrimination against mothers is multidimensional and persistent: while documented workplace success can reduce status discrimination, it can simultaneously trigger normative discrimination.