What Wikipedia has to Say on Parental Expectations…

Today I took my research topic to the one source researchers strive so hard to avoid: the dreaded Wikipedia. I entered the terms “parental leave gender expectations” into the digital platform and began my search for information. The first article I came across was “Parental Leave – Effects on Gender Equality”. It argued that parental rights are a tool for establishing gender equality, and acknowledges the US as severely lacking in parental policies compared to other developed countries (as it only offers parental leave for women, completely unpaid). This instills the gender expectation of mothers taking up the parental role, while fathers taking up the bread-winner, or worker role. The article also discusses the harm in comparing parental leave progress to policies in the past (instead of comparing policies to those of other countries now), explaining why the US hasn’t made progress in comparison to other wealthy countries.

I noticed two major issues with this article. The first, was that it only displayed 5 distinct sources to argue these ideas. Out of the 5 articles, only three were from published journals. The other two were pulled from websites, including quotes from questionable “experts” on the subject. It also used the phrase “statistics show” without elaborating on the statistics or population pool used. However, it did acknowledge the difference between a correlative versus causal study. The second issue I found was that the Wikipedia article had a few unaddressed assumptions. It first establishes the issue assuming that all couples dealing with parental leave are heterosexual companies, where one is distinctly male and the other is the pregnant female. It does not address gay couples, trans couples, or gender fluid ones. Secondly, it does not address couples who adopt young infants. The bonding argument seems critical for adopting parents, no matter what the age of the child is, for successful integration into the non-biological family. 

The second article I found on Wikipedia was the “Motherhood Penalty”. It addresses the inter-sectionality of being a mother that leads to discrimination in the workforce in processes like hiring, payment, and promotion. The inter-sectional identities mentioned include age, single vs marital status, the concept of motherhood as “status of choice”, and of course gender expectations across cultures. Again, this Wikipedia article suffers similar issues with couple expectations for sexual preference and gender identity. It does not address the inter-sectionality of sexual preference in motherhood burden, nor does it mention the interconnected identity of being gender fluid or transgender. In addition, it pulls from “several recent studies” that while from published journals, are not recent in today’s context. The given articles were from 2001, 2007, and 2009 and pulled from audit and survey studies (both of while have room for biases). Wikipedia did not acknowledge the experimental procedures from their cited articles that led them to their supporting statistics.