Stereotype Accuracy: Do College Women Miss the Mark When Estimating the Impact of Maternal Employment on Children’s Development with Wendy Goldberg

Decades after the second wave feminist movement, how do today’s college-aged women think about the effects of combining work and motherhood on children’s outcomes? In Goldberg’s study, she compared how students estimated the effect to meta-analytic effect sizes, which provided the ‘actual’ effects of maternal employment on children. Results indicated that, on average, college women overestimate the negative effects of maternal employment, especially full-time employment, on children. Significant variability in the direction and accuracy of the stereotypes was explained by individual characteristics such as culture/ethnicity, work values, and gender attitudes. In this seminar, we will discuss implications for work/life plans of the generation coming to adulthood. Speaker: Wendy Goldberg, Professor Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, UC Irvine