Parenting Journal · Volume 1 · Issue 5 · Licensed source edition
Navigating the leaky pipeline: Do stereotypes about parents predict career outcomes in academia?
Originally published 2022-10-05 · PLoS ONE
PLOS · DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0275670 ↗
Working-family evidence
Work, care and the whole person.
Tests parent–academia stereotypes in hiring recommendations, making parental status and leave history visible potential sources of bias.
Directly examines work and family life, parenting, caregiving or employment policies for families.
Editorial reading guide · Respect
Would the same applicant be judged differently after parenthood or leave is disclosed?
Tests parent–academia stereotypes in hiring recommendations, making parental status and leave history visible potential sources of bias.
Study context
180 education-sector participants in a stereotype study and 112 academics evaluating mock assistant-professor candidates.
Age / stage: Adult professionals; candidate parent and leave status manipulated.
Read with three questions
- How were gender, parental status and leave status varied in the mock candidates?
- Did the parent penalty appear only for mothers?
- How do mock recommendations differ from observed real-world hiring decisions?
Keep the limits in view
Controlled candidate profiles support inferences within the experiment, but simulated hiring and modest academic samples do not establish the size of actual hiring discrimination across workplaces.
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Original authorship, publication date, journal and DOI are preserved. This issue’s TRICK placement and reading questions are editorial additions, not claims made by the original authors.
Vasilena Stefanova; Ioana Latu (2022). Navigating the leaky pipeline: Do stereotypes about parents predict career outcomes in academia? PLoS ONE. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0275670
Permissions checked against the saved article notice; repository publication notices screened 2026-11-05. This is not a new peer-review decision. The source authors and publishers are not represented as endorsing this issue.