A girl who attends a school with classmates whose mothers work is more likely to be in the workforce when she has a child herself than a girl who grows up in local circles where most mothers stay at home, Cornell researchers have found.

“Role models pull girls in different directions in adolescence, a period when preferences are formed, when they decide what to do in their life,” said Eleonora Patacchini, the Stephen and Barbara Friedman Professor of Economics in the College of Arts and Sciences. “When they decide whether to return to work after having a child, they remember the mothers and fathers of their peers.”

Women trail men in the workforce largely because of the “child penalty” – women leaving work upon having a child and not returning. Social norms and culture influence a girls’ later decisions about participation in the work force; when she looked into precisely how, Patacchini, with doctoral student Giulia Olivero and Henrik Kleven, professor of economics at Princeton University, found that greater exposure to working moms at a very local level – the school – decreases the child penalty for girls. Meanwhile, exposure to working fathers increases the child penalty, a “striking” asymmetric effect, Patacchini said.

Girls who are socialized in an environment where most mothers work are more likely to develop a gender-role ideal that reconciles career and motherhood, they conjecture, compared with girls who are socialized in an environment where most mothers stay at home.

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