Research Progress: Maternity Bias

I began drafting my first bibliography on the topic of modesty and how it is viewed as feminist or anti-feminist today. However, as I skimmed through relevant articles on Women’s Studies International and GenderWatch databases, I quickly realized that this topic is very limited in discussion and research according to these sites. I think part of the issue is that I had a narrow argument in mind for the cause of many issues today (that cause being differing opinions on the value or expectation for women to be modest), not an issue in mind that comes with it a plethora of causes for discussion. As such, I drastically shifted my research focus from the topic of modesty, to the issue of maternity bias. I began my search by exploring the GenderWatch database, and found an article that breaks down the experience of a working woman who sued her company after mistreatment around her maternity leave. The US Supreme Court luckily ruled that she could reclaim her job. Women in the US are technically protected under the PDA (Pregnancy Discrimination Act), but discrimination still occurs in the workplace. I was then interested in why the expectation to take leave and care for a newborn child is placed on only the woman and not the parenting father. I searched “mandatory paternity leave” in the search engine, and found a Swedish study that examined the identity conflict fathers face when deciding to take paternity leave. In some cultures, sacrificing a man’s work life for home life (child care in this case) results in an identity conflict between being a man, being a father, and being a worker (Sellnow-Richmond, 2015). Then I realized, while a woman’s identity as a feminine woman does not conflict with the identity of being a mother, these identities do conflict with the identities as a student or worker. I came across a pro-life article that addressed the expectation placed on pregnant teenage women to choose being a mother over continuing their education/a career from a feminist lens (Rankin, 2014). As I read more, I want to find out why we have unequal expectations on women and men when it comes to pregnancy and child care.