Leveraging Motherhood for Leadership? Promoting Family-to-Work Enrichment for Women's Careers

Mothers experience professional disadvantages in masculine, agentic domains and roles like leadership. According to gender role theories, working women are often perceived to be either communal or agentic, with increases in one domain counterbalanced by losses in the other. In contrast, the work-family enrichment framework stipulates that work and family roles can benefit each other. Integrating these literatures, we theorize that professional mothers can be perceived as both communal and agentic by explicitly emphasizing the leadership-related resources gained from motherhood. In this way, mothers can reframe a highly communal role—motherhood—as agentic. We propose an intervention where job applicants describe affective and instrumental resources gained by motherhood as valuable for their work and leadership. We demonstrated the intervention’s positive effects on mothers’ career progression in a pre-registered encouragement field study with job-seeking mothers (N= 76) in the United States and the United Kingdom. We replicate this results in simulating callback decision with Generative AI (GPT-4). Between (N = 500) and within-subjects (N = 168) online experiments with experienced hiring managers allowed us to test and find support for our proposed mechanism: job-seeking mothers reframing their motherhood as agentic (vs. non-enrichment or control) are seen as higher in agency and communion, this leads to higher hireability and networking outcomes. Thus, by explicitly (re)framing motherhood in terms of the agentic, leadership-relevant resources it builds, job-seeking mothers improve their career progression via ascriptions of agency and communality.