By: Jessica Jensen
Chief Marketing Officer, Indeed
After her second year as an executive at an Ontario non-profit organization, Sara (who preferred to not give her last name, fearing recrimination) told her boss she was three months pregnant. He reacted “judgmentally,” she recalls. He said to her: “You just got married two months ago.”
When she returned from maternity leave, Sara said her job increased in scope, so she asked for a raise. “It’s really cheeky to ask for a raise when you took a year off,” her boss said. “At one point after asking for the raise, my supervisor said, ‘You should just go work somewhere else if you feel that way,’” Sara recalls. When she ultimately interviewed for a different job, Sara didn’t bring up the fact that she was a new mother. “I was too scared; I was afraid they wouldn’t hire me.” The recruiter had to reassure her that this new workplace “wasn’t hostile” toward parents.
Sara is like many women who face what is known as the “motherhood penalty.”
It’s the “systematic disadvantage that mothers face in terms of pay, perceived competence and benefits compared to childless women and men,” says Joeli Brearley, the author of Pregnant Then Screwed: The Truth About the Motherhood Penalty and How to Fix It. (Ms. Brearley, who was fired two days after informing her employer she was pregnant, later formed a non-profit in the U.K. to fight the motherhood penalty.)
“Ending the motherhood penalty starts with acknowledging bias,” says Sherrie Nguyen, director of product marketing and founder and co-chair of the Parents and Caregivers Inclusion Resource Group at Indeed.
The motherhood penalty hurts women when it comes to compensation, hiring, taking leaves and promotions, affecting five particular aspects of a working mother’s career.
The pay gap
In Canada, having a child decreased a mother’s wages by five cents an hour compared to women without children in 2015, according to a United Nations report. The UN Human Rights Committee report cited a concern about the persisting inequalities between women and men in Canada, in particular how it “disproportionately affects low-income women, in particular minority and indigenous women.” The gap was more pronounced in Alberta and Nova Scotia.
Part of that gap is likely due to the fact that mothers take the majority of family leave and, as a result, are absent from the workforce longer than fathers. Although Canadian parents have 40 weeks of parental leave (five specifically for dads), only about a quarter of dads in Canada use that paternity leave (except in Quebec, which adopted a unique program called the Quebec Parental Insurance Plan in 2006, and approximately 93 per cent of fathers use it).
For full-time employees, there is a 16.1-per-cent difference between annual median earnings of women relative to the annual median earnings of men, according to recent OECD data. In its ranking of more than 40 countries, Canada has the seventh-worst gender-pay gap…
Source: theglobeandmail.com
Wednesday, April 22, 2026
