Working mothers who pursue advancement in the workplace often face a hidden social penalty, as they are judged much more harshly on their parenting abilities than less ambitious women. Fathers with similar professional success do not experience such moral condemnation, revealing deep-seated biases that force women to self-regulate in order to protect their mothers’ reputations. The findings were published in the journal Psychology of Women Quarterly.
Psychology research contains a wealth of data about the penalties women face in their professional fields. One common framework for understanding this bias is role congruence theory. This theory suggests that people face social friction when they act contrary to gender stereotypes. For example, people expect women to be warm and sociable, so they react negatively when female executives behave in a harsh or pushy manner.
Another framework is the status incongruity hypothesis, which looks beyond simple personality traits to social power. Society traditionally gives women a lower social status than men. When a woman acts dominant, she is indicating her higher status in the social hierarchy. This challenges traditional gender systems and causes an unconscious defensive reaction by observers known as backlash.
Historically, researchers have focused on how this backlash negatively impacts women in the workplace, such as having promotions revoked. What is overlooked is how this punishment spills over into women’s private lives. Motherhood is a highly moralized institution governed by strict social rules. These rules stipulate that women should naturally play the role of the main caregiver and completely subordinate their personal goals to those of the family.
A team of researchers from Beijing Normal University wanted to know whether ambition at work causes backlash, especially in the realm of motherhood. The team, led by Yingmiao Shao, along with Jialin Zhou, Lu Chen, and Fang Wang, designed a series of experiments. They proposed that a woman’s career success violates traditional gender norms, thereby making her parenting abilities morally reprehensible.
To test this idea, researchers recruited 396 participants in China and had them read a biographical script about a married mother named Zhang Li. Half of the participants read that Zhang Li was very ambitious and actively communicated his strong desire for promotion to his superiors. The other half read that she has low ambitions and is simply focused on making sure she completes the assigned tasks.
After reading the biography, participants encountered a scenario in which Zhang Li forgot to pick up his 3-year-old child from kindergarten. According to the article, he was unusually busy at work that day, and as a result, the teacher called to say that the child was crying. The researchers made the actual parenting mistakes the same for both groups. Only the mothers’ basic career ambitions differed.
Depending on the women’s career ambitions, the participants’ reactions were quite different. They expressed greater anger and disgust towards ambitious mothers. They were also more likely to place more moral responsibility on her and clearly evaluate her as a bad, selfish mother compared to the very same woman portrayed as ambitious.
The researchers found that participants’ personal ideology influenced the strength of their responses. Ambitious mothers were punished most severely by those who strongly supported maternal essentialism, the belief that mothers have an irreplaceable biological ability to raise children. Similarly, those who held a strong belief that maternal self-sacrifice was absolutely necessary were particularly harsh in their judgments.
Following this initial experiment, the team wanted to test whether objective job titles evoked the same anger as internal ambition. In the second study, 400 new participants read about Zhang Li. This time there was no mention of her inner desires. Instead, she was presented as a chief financial officer or entry-level accounting assistant at a large company.
The second study utilized the exact same kindergarten scenario. Lest people think that executives simply work long hours, the researchers clearly stated that Zhang Li spent eight hours a day at work in both versions of the story. Once again, mothers with higher status had far worse parenting ratings. Participants increased their disapproval, anger, and disgust towards the chief financial officer.
This penalty occurred because people interpreted executive positions as a sign of control. The researchers measured how participants perceived this character trait and found that high-status mothers were seen as highly controlling and self-centered. The presence of these traits caused a moral backlash, as traditionally dominant traits are shunned in women.
To verify that this penalty was specific to working mothers, the researchers conducted a parallel experiment with 260 participants. They changed the character from the mother Zhang Lei to the father Zhang Lei. Everything else in the story remained the same. The father, who was either a chief financial officer or an accounting assistant, forgot to pick up his child from kindergarten.
As a result, a massive double standard was revealed. His high-ranking father felt no repulsion at all. In fact, participants rated executive fathers more positively than assistant-level fathers on the parenting comparison scale. Men in high-status roles align neatly with traditional gender hierarchies, shielding them from the moral wrath directed at women in exactly the same positions.
These external judgments ultimately shape how women view themselves. When ambitious mothers are constantly at risk of being seen as selfish, they can internalize that pressure. The research team investigated this psychological burden in a survey of 200 first-time mothers with only children under the age of three.
The researchers measured the mothers’ current career ambitions, labor income, and weekly working hours. Six weeks later, they surveyed the mothers again to assess fear of social backlash. The assessment asked women to rate how worried they were about others seeing them as bad mothers.
The results revealed that professional success has internal costs. Mothers’ actual working hours were not statistically associated with fear of being judged. Rather, her income was tied to a higher base fear of social backlash. To make matters worse, high career ambitions predicted a measurable increase in fear of negative maternal evaluation over the six-week study period.
This fear acts as an invisible barrier for working women. Even in the absence of direct verbal criticism, women may be forced to self-regulate in anticipation of being labeled a “bad parent.” To avoid moral scrutiny, mothers may abandon their career aspirations or reduce their commitment to work when they are seeking a promotion.
Although these experiments relied exclusively on mainland Chinese participants, the psychological dynamics extend to many societies. China is characterized by a high labor force participation rate among women, but there is still a deep-rooted cultural expectation that women be responsible for household chores. Such tensions between professional demands and patriarchal family structures exist in many developed countries. Similar social conditions are causing intense work-family conflict around the world.
The researchers noted several experimental limitations that require future investigation. Both episodic studies used stories involving clear parenting failures to measure participants’ reactions. The researchers used this failure scenario because it gave participants a socially acceptable excuse to express negative emotions without seeming overtly biased. Future research should examine whether ambitious mothers face judgment in completely mundane or ambiguous parenting situations.
The age of the child in the scenario may also limit the range of conclusions. Society places intense scrutiny on mothers of young children, viewing them as uniquely vulnerable and dependent. As children move toward adolescence, cultural expectations surrounding maternal involvement may also change. It remains unclear whether a woman will face the same level of backlash for missing her teenager’s soccer game as if she had left her toddler at kindergarten.
In the future, experts should investigate how a woman’s own relatives react to her career advancement. Although this study focused on judgments of strangers, mothers’ romantic partners may also harbor unconscious biases. To address this bias, we need to challenge the moral panic around maternal sacrifice and recognize that social norms artificially penalize women’s success.
The study, “Successful Women but ‘Bad Mothers’: Negative Mother Evaluations as a Backlash Against Working Mothers,” was authored by Yingmiao Shao, Jialin Zhou, Lu Chen, and Fang Wang.
