Bad mommies: socio-cognitive judgments of single mothers with alcohol use disorder

Abstract

Gender disparity persists in the United States; women are still paid less than men and are also subject to discrimination in the workplace based on the fact that they may become mothers. Further, there is evidence to indicate that single mothers are judged more harshly than their married mother counterparts and single fathers. As a form of amelioration, some women self medicate with alcohol and according to the CDC), alcohol use disorder (AUD) is on the rise for women. Although there is research on gender disparity, the motherhood penalty, and AUD, there are no experiments testing socio-cognitive judgments on those combined factors and specifically examining what we term “the single motherhood penalty”. Therefore, in two experiments using between-participants designs, participants rated a picture of a person (female or male) paired with a brief description where marital status (single or married) and type of ailment (alcohol or physical) was manipulated. In Experiment 1, a passive AUD manipulation did not show a clear single motherhood penalty. In Experiment 2, the results of an active AUD manipulation supported the predicted single motherhood penalty (Experiment 2a), but did not show an analogous single fatherhood penalty (Experiment 2 b). These findings are the first to offer empirical evidence that socio-cognitive judgments might perpetuate the interplay of the single motherhood penalty and AUD.