An academic career values continuity. Publications follow their own rhythm, grants have fixed timelines, conferences open and close their windows of opportunity, and promotions rely on formal criteria that rarely take account of interruptions or overload. It is precisely within this logic that the phenomenon known as the “motherhood penalty” most easily emerges. It does not have to involve overt discrimination. More often, it consists of small, repeated shifts: in how commitment is assessed, in access to projects, in supervisors’ willingness to offer support, and in what is considered acceptable to say openly versus what is better left unsaid.
In an article published in Career Development International, Dr Zuzanna Staniszewska and her co-authors examine this mechanism in the context of four universities in Jordan, drawing on face-to-face interviews with twenty women, both mothers and women expecting to become mothers. The authors conceptualize an academic career as the intersection of two orders: the micro level of professional identity, pregnancy, and motherhood, and the macro level of institutional policies, contract types, and HR practices. It is precisely at this intersection that a structural “penalty” emerges, one that can significantly slow down a professional trajectory.
Beyond work–family balance
The study is grounded in two theoretical frameworks that capture academia as a strongly normative environment. The first is social role theory, which highlights how expectations toward women and men differ, and how the stereotype of women as caregivers can be embedded in everyday assessments of who is considered “available,” “serious,” and “fully committed” to work.
The second framework is intersectionality. Difficulties do not accumulate in a simple, additive way. Instead, they reinforce one another when a person simultaneously operates within multiple frames of pressure, in this case as both an academic and a mother. From this perspective, motherhood is not an add-on to a career. It is an experience that interacts with the institution and its rules, and only then does its full significance become visible.
The everyday architecture of overload
Participants repeatedly referred to work–family conflict, but without dramatization and with striking precision. One interviewee remarked that “you think you are a multitasker until you have your first child,” at which point it becomes clear that simultaneity has limits.
This observation is accompanied by an important insight: academic workload is not limited to teaching and research. It also includes growing administrative duties, quality assurance requirements, documentation, and formal procedures. This “invisible” work, largely absent from publication metrics, can be particularly burdensome for those who simultaneously bear full caregiving responsibility.
Another theme that emerges is the psychological cost of constant availability. “I am always on edge,” one participant explains, describing a decline in self-confidence, sleep problems, and physical strain. This shifts the discussion away from time management toward well-being and health, areas that academia often treats as private rather than institutional concerns.
Hidden barriers
One of the article’s strongest findings concerns the role of ambiguous policies and limited institutional support during pregnancy. The authors describe this as a structural mechanism: when rules are unclear or poorly communicated, responsibility for managing the situation falls on the individual. Each request for leave, workload adjustment, or workplace safety then becomes a negotiation. In hierarchical institutions, such negotiations easily turn into sources of anxiety and guilt.
This part of the analysis is particularly valuable because it frames motherhood not as a biological event, but as a moment that reveals institutional assumptions. It tests whether an institution can uphold standards of equality when the model of the “ideal worker” no longer fits someone’s life situation.
Identity tensions
In the third theme, intersectionality moves beyond theory and becomes lived experience. Participants describe how the intersection of motherhood and professional academic identity generates tensions that are not merely additional burdens, but that fundamentally reshape how one functions within the institution. There is pressure to minimize the visibility of motherhood in order to continue being perceived as a “serious” academic, as if an academic career required a biography without interruptions, without bodies, and without care.
At the same time, the article does not construct a narrative of loss alone. Participants also describe developmental aspects of motherhood: as a source of soft skills, patience, empathy, and discipline that strengthen teaching and mentoring. This contrast is deeply human and communicatively important. The problem is not children or motherhood, but institutional frameworks that can turn a natural life stage into a career cost.
The unrecognized resources of motherhood
In the participants’ narratives, motherhood does not appear solely as a source of constraints or professional penalties. Alongside experiences of overload and institutional pressure, a less obvious dimension emerges: motherhood as a source of competencies and resources that remain largely invisible in academic evaluation systems.
Women described pregnancy and motherhood as experiences that fostered greater empathy in teaching, increased patience in mentoring relationships, and heightened research sensitivity. Their accounts also highlight resilience and creative strategies for coping with structural constraints, from informal support networks to redefining priorities and reorganizing academic work.
This theme is crucial because it shifts the analytical focus. The problem is not motherhood itself or the challenge of “balancing roles,” but the absence of an institutional language and tools to recognize the value that such experiences bring to academic work. As a result, competencies developed through motherhood operate outside official criteria of academic excellence, even though they directly enhance the quality of teaching, mentoring, and reflective research practice.
From this perspective, the motherhood penalty does not consist solely in penalizing career interruptions or reduced availability. It also involves the systematic failure to recognize the capital that emerges at the intersection of caregiving and academic work. It is precisely this limited institutional capacity to identify and value such experiences that turns a natural stage of life into a perceived career cost, rather than a potentially enriching dimension of academic practice.
The study focuses on Jordan and cannot be automatically generalized to all regions of the world. Its strength lies in bringing to light an aspect that often escapes discussions of equality in academia: equality policies are tested not in declarations, but in critical moments such as pregnancy, return to work, evaluation of output during objectively more demanding periods, and in the “culture of silence” surrounding rights and support.
