Various investigations based on statistical data have confirmed that women, especially those with children, enjoy reduced access to positions of responsibility. The simplistic interpretation would be that women, in particular if they are mothers, under equal individual conditions as men, have fewer probabilities of being considered for promotion at work. However, recent research studies analysing decision-making processes in companies show that the reality is somewhat more complex. In fact, the results indicate that, when female candidates are assessed for promotion at work, mothers with children have significantly higher scores than men without children. Furthermore, mothers have very similar scores to fathers and the latter, in turn, have higher scores than men without children (figure 1). We could conclude, therefore, that contrary to what might be thought a priori, when the decision-making process within companies is analysed, under equal conditions there is no evidence that female employees with children face a penalty with regard to being promoted at work.

This fact is partially explained by the  perceived degree of competition, in other words, because workers with children (men and women) are perceived as being more competent and prepared in labour terms, whereas women without children – and even more so men without children – are considered less competent workers than mothers. The data show that when people with possibilities of being promoted are compared, those who have children are seen as more competent because they are showing that they are capable of simultaneously tackling the tasks of running the family and performing their work efficiently.

In Europe, reconciling working life and private life is more widespread and socially accepted than in other areas such as, for example, the United States. Legal working hours in most countries are 40 hours per week, and the reduction of the working week to 35 hours in order to care for children or dependent family members is recognised. Furthermore, teleworking or distance working, in other words, working from a place different to the workplace or the company’s central offices is increasingly widespread.

The specialised literature has confirmed that workers that use these types of employment flexibility measures (reducing weekly working hours or working from elsewhere) may be giving their employers signals of weaker commitment to their employment, as they are more distanced from the ideal of the worker totally devoted to their work and always available for their organisation.

From this angle, we could think that, independently of gender or family situation, the more hours per week people work and the fewer they teleworking, the greater the opportunities will be for the promotion at work of the employee (male or female), because it will be considered that that person has a greater commitment to their work. In other words, the people who have longer working hours and who resort less to teleworking or distance working are better positioned for promotion at work.

The results of this research are consistent with this hypothesis. First of all, it is confirmed that candidates who telework for just two days per week receive lower evaluations for being promoted than those who work every day directly from the office. Similarly, candidates with reduced working hours (35 hours per week) receive significantly lower scores than those with the usual working week of 40 hours or that work an hour extra every day (45 hours per week).

The explanation is that it is women who most resort to employment flexibility schemes such as reduced working hours or teleworking (see figure 3 in relation to reductions in working hours), which largely reduces the appeal of candidates (men and women) for being promoted. It would be necessary to talk, therefore, about the existence of “hidden costs” behind such measures as flexibility of working hours and employment conditions. In short, we can conclude that in a situation of equality of aptitudes, women with children are not in a worse position when it comes to promotion to positions of responsibility. But an indirect penalty does exist: if women are usually promoted less, it is because it is women who opt to a larger extent for more flexible working hours and working conditions.

Asking employers directly, by way of a survey, about their preferences for promoting different types of workers is not the best way of ascertaining how they make their decisions. The reason is that, if they were guilty of any discriminatory behaviour towards certain groups, they would probably not recognise this in a survey. This is what is known as “social desirability” bias. That is why it is more appropriate to use some type of experimental or quasi-experimental methodology, that analyses people’s real behaviour, replicating as far as possible the real conditions of decision-making.

In this study, real supervisors from private companies were asked to assess a series of short descriptions (called vignettes) of previously randomised candidates in order to determine to what extent they would recommend each of them for promotion at work in their company. All the fictitious candidates shared certain characteristics (training, civil status, age and experience in the company), while the rest of the characteristics varied from some vignettes to others (mainly gender, whether they had children or not, the number of hours worked per week and whether some days in the week they teleworked from outside of the office or not).

The supervisors were asked to determine not only how likely they would be to recommend the promotion of each of those people (on a scale of 1-5), but also to evaluate their degree of commitment to their work, their professional competence and the warmth in their treatment of people. These three evaluations enable an understanding of the explanatory mechanisms that may be behind decisions to promote employees. The field work was carried out between March and July 2017. A total of 82 people with supervisory responsibilities in their companies responded.

FERNÁNDEZ-LOZANO, I.; González, M. J.; Jurado-Guerrero, T. e Martínez-Pastor, J. I. (2020): “The Hidden Cost of Flexibility: A Factorial Survey Experiment on Job Promotion”, European Sociological Review, 36 (2): 265-283.