Should You Put ‘Parent’ on Your Resume?
A Fuqua professor looks into age-old workplace biases
Image Photo courtesy of the Fuqua School of Business
Published: October 5, 2026
Schools
Fuqua School of Business
Scholars
Ashleigh Shelby Rosette
James L. Vincent Distinguished Professor of Leadership
Professor of Business Administration
Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology
View Scholars@Duke Profile
This is a summary of a story on Duke’s Fuqua School of Business.
Conventional wisdom, bolstered by years of research, has long held that motherhood negatively impacts women’s earnings and opportunities in the workplace. But a new study by Duke Fuqua professor Ashleigh Shelby Rosette found no substantiative evidence of a “motherhood penalty.”
Instead, researchers determined that parenthood – for men and women – has a positive impact in the workplace.
“We found that this long-held established presumption of a ‘motherhood penalty’ no longer held up in these experimental studies,” said Rosette.
Rosette and the study’s co-authors tested if people still discriminate against mothers in the workplace by perceiving them as less competent than women without children. The researchers found that the study’s participants rated parents on both sides of the gender stripe as warmer, more competent, and more deserving of a promotion than non-parents.
They conducted a second test with a larger pool of participants that produced a second unexpected result: While gender was not a factor in boosting the perceptions of parenthood in the workplace, race did. While white parents benefitted from high perceptions of warmth and recommendations for job promotions, Black parents were not the beneficiaries of a boost in warmth, competence or recommendations for job promotions.
Rosette and her research colleagues dug deeper. They asked 1,200 participants to evaluate a fictitious job candidate’s suitability at a company seeking an assistant vice president of financial affairs. The study again found that while neither gender was held to different workplace standards, race minimized the parental boost.
“Perceptions of white employees became more favorable when they were described as parents, but the same boost did not occur for Black employees,” Rosette said. “This result was unexpected.”
The researchers also acknowledge that the motherhood penalty could still potentially emerge in other areas. “Participants evaluate someone based on a limited profile and in this context, we did not find any evidence to support the motherhood penalty has disappeared,” said Rosette. “It may still emerge in more dynamic and consequential workplace settings.”
To learn more about the study visit the Fuqua School of Business.