A survey of 1,000+ Seattle-area lawyers that separates the career cost of being a mother from the cost of being a woman.
A regional association of attorney mothers wanted evidence for firm leaders: which obstacles come from parenting, which come from gender, where do the two compound, and which policies would help?
Wording, scales and skip logic built to support planned tests.
Qualtrics, pretested, three weeks in the field. ~11,000 lawyers by email, plus a QR code in bar publications.
A custom R pipeline modeled every question.
The core design: gender × parenthood. Comparing all four groups separates being a woman from raising children, while revealing whenever having children affects women and men differently.
Logistic or linear models by question type, with age controlled where it could confound.
Some strains hit all parents. Others hit primarily women, with or without children. But some penalized women with children more than men.
Mothers were far more likely to report that they handle childcare alone; fathers more often described responsibilities as shared.
Compared with peers without children, fathers work more and want part-time less; mothers show the opposite inclination.
Small firms keep mothers with time, large firms with career.
Parents were older. With age controlled, the effect disappeared.
The desire for paid leave and flexible hours are shared across genders, but changes to how firms count hours and give credit matter to far more to mothers than fathers.
Women face a gender penalty, with or without children
Address implicit bias; track advancement with metrics
Mothers prioritize billable-hour and credit reforms
Rework compensation and hours; make flexibility penalty-free
Firm size changes what keeps mothers
Tailor retention strategy to the firm