Agency Penalties From Taking Parental Leave for Women in Men-Dominated Occupations: Archival and Experimental Evidence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Organizations have started more progressively using and offering family benefits including parental leaves to address the issues of balancing work and family life. Although such leaves are fundamental for supporting, attracting, and retaining women, we examine whether such leaves may also inadvertently affect women's careers in occupations that overly value masculine traits, unless managed carefully. Drawing on the literature on gender stereotypes (micro factors) and occupation gender type (macro factors), we argue that longer (vs. shorter) parental leaves negatively affect women's work outcomes (i.e., annual income, salary recommendation, hireability, and leadership effectiveness) in men-dominated but not in women-dominated occupations because it lowers perceptions of women's agency. We find support for our hypotheses across three studies in the Australian context with an archival data set and two experiments. Our work shows that men-dominated organizational structures reinforce traditional gender stereotypes, whereas such reinforcement does not happen in women-dominated organizational structures. Our research equips leaders and organizations with insights into the unintended negative consequences of parental leave for women. This understanding serves as a crucial first step in developing strategies and programs to mitigate these effects, thereby supporting women in men-dominated occupations and fostering more inclusive and healthy workplaces.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".