Member Articles

The kid ceiling seems to have little or no effect on Sarah Palin, but for most women who work, having a family alters their income, their ability to advance, and their well-being.  All is not right in the world of women’s work, and the glaring deficiencies force more women to move in the direction of the smaller or “new traditional family” as I call the single-child family in my book, Parenting An Only Child.

The more children you have, the more likely you’ll feel the impact of the kid ceiling long before you see the glass ceiling. Call it what you will -- The “kid ceiling,” “maternal wall,” “mommy gap,” "baby gap," "motherhood penalty," or “mommy track,” it boils down to the same thing: barriers and obstacles for women who work and want to move up AND raise a family.

The kid ceiling confronts women in both obvious and subtle ways. Employers’ attitudes, the lack of on-the-job flexibility and support for mothers in the workplace, and salary gaps between male and female workers further underscore the strong bias that exists against women.

During dinner with a group of friends not too long ago, I had a heated argument with Dave, the head of a fairly sizable law firm. Dave announced that he didn’t want to hire women attorneys. “It’s a waste of time and resources,” he said. “You put all this money into training them and then they leave as soon as they have children.” With law schools turning out at least 50 percent female attorneys, Dave is greatly narrowing his field. More striking is his thinking; it dates back a of couple generations when women stayed home to raise their children. This underlying mind-set lingers widely, ignoring the fact that the majority of women work, most because they have to.  

In a presidential address to the American Psychological Association a few years ago, Diane Halpern noted that “despite changes in the workforce, the world of work is still largely organized for a family model that is increasingly rare -- one with a stay-at-home caregiver.” These personal stories collected by Northern Colorado psychologist Jill Kuhn and reported in The Feminist Psychologist illustrate how deep in the dark ages companies and their policies remain: