Joan Williams, center, chats with Connie McGreavy, right, who is the sister of Kathy Mallon, and Barb Silver, URI’s director of advance programs, during Williams’ lecture earlier this month. Mallon, who died in 2006, was executive assistant to the university president and played an important role in URI’s master planning process.

The Providence Journal / Kathy Borchers

Is motherhood bad for your career?

Joan C. Williams, a law professor at the Hastings School of Law at the University of California and director of the Center for WorkLife Law, said that, in many cases, it is.

During a presentation Oct. 3 at the University of Rhode Island, Williams cited sociological studies that showed mothers are 79 percent less likely to be hired, 100 percent less likely to be promoted, and are offered starting salaries that average $11,000 less than their childless counterparts. Williams said there is a “motherhood penalty” on wages of approximately 5 percent for every child a woman has — and 82 percent of American women become mothers.

“People asked me how I got interested in this area,” Williams said. “I said that I was an environmental lawyer who had a baby.”

To the familiar image of the “glass ceiling,” which prevents women from being promoted into the highest level jobs, Williams adds “the maternal wall.” But while the glass ceiling generally affects women in professional and managerial occupations, Williams said, the maternal wall affects women across a far wider spectrum of occupations and social classes.

In 2000, she published her book Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What to Do About It. An article last year in The New York Times Magazine referred to her as having “something approaching rock-star status” among lawyers and scholars who specialize in work/life conflict.

Her visit to URI was sponsored by the university’s ADVANCE Program, financed by a $3.5-million grant from the National Science Foundation and designed to recruit and retain female faculty members in science, technology, engineering and math. Williams’ visit was made possible by a donation from the Kathy Mallon Memorial Fund. Mallon, who died in 2006, was executive assistant to the university president and played an important role in URI’s master planning process.

Williams’ public presentation on Friday afternoon was her fifth event of the day, following separate meetings with university administrators, departmental chairs, union leaders and women in the sciences. Williams said she was “exhausted but very impressed” with URI’s efforts to confront issues of work/life balance.

Williams said a key problem is that the American workplace is still designed around an “ideal worker” who works for 40 years without a significant break. That’s not very practical for women with children, she said, and as a result mothers are often pushed to the margins of economic life. The traditional workplace is perfect for men with stay-at-home wives — still the paradigm for elite jobs in America.

Williams said some economists respond to evidence of maternal discrimination by saying that, unlike race or gender, motherhood is a choice for women. But Williams said choosing motherhood should not mean choosing discrimination on the job.

“Women choose motherhood; they don’t choose the marginalization that comes with it,” she said. “They don’t choose a workplace that’s designed around men’s bodies and life patterns … it’s a workplace ideal perfectly designed for the lifestyle of the 1950s.”

Motherhood often becomes a trigger for gender stereotyping on the job, Williams said. In a statement she made last year before the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), she said that even women who had simply been perceived as workers are often perceived through “a gender lens” once they’ve had a child.

Pointing to various discrimination cases that have been brought to the courts, Williams told the EEOC that bias against mothers in the workplace is often not the least bit subtle. When one employee called to arrange her return from maternity leave, her boss fired her, saying she would no longer be dependable and that her proper place was at home with her child. Another was shown a job profile that said her company preferred to employ unmarried, childless women because they would give 150 percent to the job.

At URI, Williams cited research conducted by Cornell University sociologist Shelley Correll. In one experiment, paid volunteers were asked to rate two job applicants whose resumes were identical in every way, with the exception that one indicated parenthood and the other did not. In that study, mothers were viewed as less competent, less committed, and were held to higher standards of performance and punctuality.

And where do fathers fit in?

Williams said it depends on what a father plans to do. Fathers in the role of family breadwinner, she said, are looked on favorably. Fathers who plan to take a more active part in caregiving, such as taking extended family leave, are penalized on the job. The penalties might take the form of blocked promotions or lower performance ratings. Men are disadvantaged by their gender, too, Williams said, if they don’t want to stick to traditional masculine roles.

“The workplace has a profound influence on what men are allowed to do. … A lot of what is considered an unequal division of work inside the family begins in the workplace,” Williams said.

The area of the law in which Williams works is called family responsibilities discrimination. Besides parenting issues, it can cover employees who care for sick spouses or elderly parents. Williams said it has become a hot topic in employment law, with more than 1,300 cases filed in the past decade, a 400-percent increase.

Williams said plaintiffs are having some success in these cases, even before conservative judges and juries, particularly when the cases are argued in terms of family values. “Juries can get really mad if someone is faced with a choice between being a good employee and a good mom,” she said.

She pointed to a case, upheld by the Supreme Court, called Burlington Northern vs. White, in which an employee who had complained of discrimination found her schedule changed so she was unable to get home in time to care for her son, who had Down syndrome, when he got home from school.

“A schedule change in an employee’s work schedule may make little difference to many workers, but may matter enormously to a young mother with school-age children,” the court said.

In another case cited on the WorkLife Center Web site ( www.worklifelaw.org), a delivery driver was placed on involuntary and unpaid medical leave after informing her employer she was pregnant, because the employer thought she couldn’t do the job. She asked for work in any other capacity, but was ultimately fired. A California jury awarded her more than $2.3 million.

Williams said management lawyers have been quick to take notice of these cases, and have been contacting the WorkLife Center to help in training their clients. It’s a complicated area of the law. In her EEOC statement Williams noted that family-responsibilities discrimination cases have been argued under 17 different legal theories, from the Americans with Disabilities Act to a number of state statutes.

“Five years ago, it was considered common knowledge that you couldn’t litigate any of these issues,” Williams said. “Now management-side lawyers are all over this. That’s a huge change.”

Williams’ presentation at URI ended with a brief opportunity for the audience to ask questions. Inevitably, the subject of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, who has five children, came up. Williams said she was glad when Palin’s husband, Tom, announced he would be the parental caretaker.

“It’s science fiction to think that one person could be vice president and the other work in the oil fields and no one would take care of the kids,” she said.

Williams said there was “no way in heck” that Sarah Palin would have been chosen by John McCain as his running mate if it had not been for Hillary Clinton’s bruising primary fight against Barack Obama. “Progress happens in strange, contorted ways, and I think it [Palin’s nomination] is real progress — although I won’t vote for her,” Williams said.

asmith@projo.com