[1] It can also specifically refer to work arrangements for women in the workforce that facilitate motherhood, such as flexible hours, but at the same time usually provides fewer opportunities for career advancement.
Writer Jennifer A. Kingson introduced the term "mommy track" in an August 8, 1988, article in The New York Times, in which she described the career hurdles faced by law firm associates who sacrificed advancement potential once they had children.
[4] Felice Schwartz's 1989 article in the Harvard Business Journal is sometimes called the first discussion of the mommy track phenomenon.
[7] Schwartz wrote: The misleading metaphor of the glass ceiling suggests an invisible barrier constructed by corporate leaders to impede the upward mobility of women beyond the middle levels.
The barriers to women’s leadership occur when potentially counterproductive layers of influence on women—maternity, tradition, socialization—meet management strata pervaded by the largely unconscious preconceptions, stereotypes, and expectations of men.
In the US, choosing to have children will force a woman to give up 21 to 33 percent of her lifetime earnings, a loss that could cost up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
[13] Higher-skilled women tend to have flatter wage-earning trajectories than their low-skilled counterparts after giving birth, primarily seen in a lack of wage growth.
[15] Even ten years after having children, a mother in the US in this income bracket earns wages that are about 12% lower than non-mother, low-skilled women.
[17] Part-time work and flextime or more flexible arrangements are seen as hallmarks of the mommy track, since they point to women not being in the workplace full-time.
[18] Despite this, the modern ideal of "intensive parenting", first described by Sharon Hays, ensures that mothers continue to take primary responsibility for raising children due to the engrained social norm that women are better nurturers.
[3] There is also an ongoing discussion of whether the wage gap that results from a mommy track is any sort of societal discrimination against women, or basically an effect of mothers choosing to spend more time away from work.
[26] As of 2015, the US was one of only three countries in the world (the other two being Papua New Guinea and Suriname) that does not have laws that require employers to provide paid maternity leave.
[29] Common business practices in Japan further penalize mothers who may have taken leave from the workplace at some point, due to companies choosing to only recruit directly from universities and setting upper limits on age for full-time positions.
[41] According to a 2007 UNICEF report, in Sweden, although parents are given 12 months of parental leave time that can be divided between the two as each couple sees best, gender norms continue to have an effect: mandated maternity leave combined with Sweden allowing women to reduce work hours after giving birth means that nearly half of mothers in dual-income families work less than full-time.