The Mothers Are Missing
Can changing the sports industry bring them back?
I have two small humans in my life who call me “mama”. With only that information about me, what image comes to mind?
A woman playing with children? Preparing snacks? Reading at bedtime?
Are there any images in your head that include me as a professional? As an individual, apart from my children?
The stereotyping of mothers underlies one of the largest challenges along the path to gender equality: The motherhood penalty — systemic bias that underlies disadvantages in pay, salary, and promotion, lower perceived competence, and higher expectations for mothers relative to men or childless women. Combine that with the lack of support for women as they navigate their own sense of family-work integration, and you have a professional world where the mothers go missing.
The past year has made a dramatic display of the inequities working mothers have always faced. As a result, we lost millions of working mothers as women made impossible choices forced upon them by systemic failures.
The past year has made a dramatic display of the inequities working mothers have always faced.
When Alysia Montaño and I founded our nonprofit, &Mother, last year, we wanted to identify and address the barriers that stand between motherhood and true gender equity, starting with the sports industry, where Alysia’s #DreamMaternity movement was born. While we’d like to claim a prescient sixth sense that something terrible was coming, we did not presage the pandemic that would set working women, especially mothers, back a whole generation. But here we are. Call it a mother’s intuition.
The sports industry is an interesting and accurate microcosm for what working mothers face across industries. There are several parallels, but one that looms large is the myth of motherhood as a “career killer.” This myth is trapped in a cycle of self-perpetuation and self-fulfilling prophecy. When a woman does not come back to competition after starting their family, it’s because “she had a baby” or “she’s a mother now.” These assumptions feed the false narrative that she made some kind of binary choice or was not physically capable of return. But the assumptions ignore the full story of why women often do not come back to compete after having a baby. Spoiler alert: it’s not me — it’s you.
The myth of motherhood as a “career killer” is trapped in a cycle of self-perpetuation and self-fulfilling prophecy.
In professional sports, the added physicality of athletics opens the door for misguided beliefs about what the female body is capable of during and after creating a new human. Misperceptions abound regarding the time requirement of mothering (not fathering though!), and these misperceptions pervade industrial sensibilities around the relationship between mothering and the potential for professional excellence.
Societal assumptions about mothers ignore the invisible sandtraps that force them to choose, or worse, make the choice for them. In professional sports, in particular, a failure to return likely had nothing to do with what the mother’s body was capable of or how she navigated her own balancing act of training and mothering. For example, when gender and maternal biases limit sponsorship opportunities, how do you train if you no longer have the financial backing to pay for childcare? When every message fed to you in your career has signaled that “mothers do not exist in this space,” at what point do you realize that mothers can exist in that space? If asking for non-standard accommodations or support makes you a target for discrimination, how do you feel safe openly discussing your needs?
Now that I am in the maternal bias-and-gender-equity space, when my job comes up in conversation with another mother, she immediately tells me her discrimination story. Everyone has one.
The deep-rooted myth is steeped in the motherhood penalty. The myth makes its way into the structures and expectations within sponsorship contracts, even for the best in the world; it changes how women see their options. Many find that they have to fight harder and make impossible sacrifices to have the opportunity to continue and excel. Many hide their motherhood if they continue competing. The result is the same — the mothers go missing. And the palpable absence of mothers propagates the myth. And those of us watching these athletes compete — our girls, our boys finding their role models on the track or playing field — are fed the myth over and over again.
Which makes sports the perfect petri dish for changing the narrative.
I am not a professional athlete. I am a scientist by training. I spent over a decade on a quest to remain in academia, do research, and teach for all of my days. I left after two postdoctoral fellowships (similar to legions of other new mothers) to jump into the start-up world, joining a maternal health company at a very early stage. I birthed one daughter during my second postdoc and another daughter while at the startup. In many ways, I felt supported and seen as a scientist, a brain, a valuable contributor. In many ways, I felt like the mom who sheepishly leaves early, the mom who needs “special” accommodation, the mom who cannot commit to things, the mom whose brain simply must be a bit foggy and therefore filled with ideas that are not valid.
The palpable absence of mothers propagates the myth. And those of us watching these athletes compete — our girls, our boys finding their role models on the track or playing field — are fed the myth over and over again.
The athletes’ stories are all of our stories. During my time in the maternal health-startup space, whenever my job came up in conversation with another mother, she would immediately tell me her birth story. Now that I am in the maternal bias-and-gender-equity space, when my job comes up in conversation with another mother, she immediately tells me her discrimination story. Everyone has one.
It’s time for change.
At &Mother, we not only want to break the self-perpetuating cycle of the myth, we want to reverse its course. Within and beyond the sports industry, we envision a working world where motherhood is seen as a value add. Where employers clamor to hire mothers, promote mothers, offer better salaries and standings. This is not an unreasonable expectation, fatherhood already has this — the opposite of the motherhood penalty is the fatherhood bonus. Fathers get all of those things.
Once we have the acknowledgment of motherhood as a value add, we, as a society, can layer on the expectation that women will have the support and flexibility they need to navigate work-life integration on their own terms. This work has been initiated beautifully in the corporate space with Mother’s Monday — “a day to ask how we might collectively reinvent the relationship between motherhood and work so that ambition and caregiving can co-exist”. We need to challenge the system we have been boxed into and create a future of work that reflects the needs of the modern family.
It is time to change the system, honor the value of women as humans, contributors, thought-leaders, experts, champions, and mothers.
Everyone benefits from a working world where the mothers are no longer missing.
Molly Dickens is a co-founder and the founding Executive Director of &Mother, a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to breaking the barriers that limit a woman’s choice to pursue and thrive in both career and motherhood.
Learn more about our work at andmother.org.
