Do moms make better managers?

Do mothers make better leaders than women without children?

Most employees think so. Most employers don't.

A survey last Mother's Day by the professional women's networking organization WorldWit found that 69% would rather work for a mother than a non-mother, and only 2% prefer a non-mother. They say mothers have patience and listening skills, and understand when others encounter family demands.

E-Trade CEO Mitch Caplan, whose children are 16, 18 and 21, says mothers are "absolutely" superior at managing time and prioritizing. He says children are good at training business leaders to motivate others who don't walk through the door with the same priorities and goals.

From management's perspective, Caplan is an exception. Cornell associate professor of sociology Shelley Correll found a "motherhood penalty" when she submitted nearly identical resumes for fictitious women applying for a job as marketing director at a communications company. Some resumes said the applicant was active in the Parent-Teacher Association, an obvious hint at motherhood. That cut the chances of getting a job by 44%. Follow-up research found that salary offers decrease with each additional child, Correll says.

Still, mothers are reaching the highest ranks in business. The women at the top of the two largest companies with a female CEO -- Archer Daniels Midland's Patricia Woertz and Sara Lee's Brenda Barnes -- are both mothers of three. And there is no mileage in voicing anything that smacks of anti-motherhood. Few employers will openly say they are partial to women without children, and a survey of 5,165 adults just released by Adecco Staffing North America found that 68% feel bosses recognize that working mothers are great at balancing their roles of mother and employee. Just 4% say bosses think mothers are not as committed to their jobs.

But Cynthia McKay, the childless CEO of Le Gourmet Gift Basket, says it's common sense for employers to hire childless women. Not that she takes her own advice. McKay employs 31 women, no men, and about 85% have children. They were all hired to work full time. But McKay says the mothers have interpreted full time as about 22 hours a week as they rush off to baseball practices and dentist appointments.

She recalls one mom missing a business flight to Hawaii because she overslept after staying up late making a Halloween costume for her 6-year-old.

Although no other executives interviewed were as frank as McKay, such views are widespread, says WorldWit founder Liz Ryan, mother of five ages 3 to 12. She says she hears almost daily from panicked women afraid to tell the boss that they're pregnant. "It's a death sentence," she says.

Ryan says a female sales manager at a high-tech company recounted being praised at a meeting. In front of her colleagues, all men, her male boss told her to expense her birth control pills, because the worst thing that could happen to the sales team would be for her to get pregnant.

Adjusting the work schedule

Law firms are notorious for long hours and inflexible schedules, so when Jennifer Wolfe was bedridden with pregnancy complications three years ago with her son Jack, she wrote a business plan that led to the largest female-owned firm in Ohio. Seven of the firm's 10 attorneys are women.

One of her lawyers, Jennifer Livingston, works entirely from home, where she cares for her 19-month-old son, Mason, and is expecting her second child in October. Jeanette Dannenfelser is a trial attorney who works Monday through Thursday to spend more time with her 1-year-old son, Aidan, adopted from Kazakhstan four months ago.

Wolfe, whose husband is the firm's operations manager, says she has had to "pick up Jack, face cooking dinner and doing laundry, and deal with temper tantrums and potty training. I don't know how you couldn't go through a transformation."

She has installed a system that lets her lawyers more easily cover for each other. Yet, flexibility is not a free pass, and Wolfe says she expects no complaining if they are needed on a Sunday.

One downside is that the firm's reputation for being family friendly has attracted applicants who think they will be paid the same money for less work. "That's crazy," says Wolfe. If motherhood reduces performance, compensation should likewise be reduced, she says.

Livingston took a pay cut when she quit her job as an intellectual property lawyer at a Fortune 500 company, a job she said she loved. But her boss and her boss' boss were both women without children. There is a noticeable difference in leadership style, she says.

Dannenfelser agrees that mothers such as Wolfe make better bosses, but says her reference point is her former firm, where the partners were all men.

Double standards?

Some women and men interviewed said they found the topic of mothers vs. non-mothers a double standard, because men are not similarly scrutinized for fatherhood. After being interviewed, executive coach Karyl Innis attended a meeting where she posed the topic of this article to nine senior female executives, eight of whom are mothers. They hated the question.

"It pits one group of women against another. Would we ask, 'Do fathers make better leaders?' The answer is, some do and some don't," Innis says.

Ryan said she was unaware that mothers were treated differently until she had twins. She found herself overcompensating by working harder and ignoring her children to prove she was serious about her job. While many men are guilty of thinking motherhood hurts competency, she says the worst critics are women who say they have chosen career over children. With them, mothers are doomed, Ryan says.

However, there is another camp that believes motherhood hones leadership. "It's simplistic to generalize that mothers make better managers or CEOs," says Linda Sawyer, CEO of advertising agency Deutsch and mother of sons 9 and 14. "Having said that, being a mother can offer great perspective since, at the end of the day, many adults behave like children."

Lois Quam, CEO of Ovations, the largest division at UnitedHealth Group and one of the most powerful women in health care, had three boys within 23 months, including twins who are now 14.

She says there were many days when she arrived at work to find that she had to leave to get a child to the doctor. That taught her to get the most important work done early. Success in business and life comes down to being "crystal clear about priorities every day and (to) relentlessly follow through," she says. "You have to get up in the morning and know what's most important. What's the mission and the priorities."

Time management vital

Denise Morrison, president of Campbell Soup's U.S. soup, sauces and beverages division, worked while her daughters, 27 and 25, were growing up -- and while Nestle's director of marketing, she was still able to squeeze in a stint as Brownie leader. "They were a results-driven Brownie troop," she says.

She talks of the ability to multitask, but says the most important leadership lesson mothers learn is dealing with shades of gray that children present. "They are also incredibly honest, and they humble you. That is good."

E-Trade's Caplan is a parenthood enthusiast who believes fathers also have a distinct leadership advantage. Other male CEOs praised mothers but were careful to say that it's not a key factor.

"There are a lot of ways to learn time-management skills," says Allstate CEO Edward Liddy, including going to business or law school part time while holding down a job. "You are the sum of your life experiences."

Robert Keane, CEO of the online supplier of graphic design company VistaPrint, says he has worked for women with and without children, and now employs them. "Great leaders come from all walks of life. Being a parent is wonderful, but it's not a prerequisite."

Bob Peterson, president of Melton Truck Lines, says he has never worked for a woman. "However, I have many working for me, mothers and non-mothers," he says. "The mothers have family obligations that the non-mothers do not, but I have effective moms and effective non-moms. Frankly, I think the article's premise is a stretch."

Wolfe wonders if the motherhood-leadership connection is a chicken-and-egg thing. She says she has always had a compassionate streak. Maybe, she says, motherhood doesn't make for good leaders, but the qualities that would make a good mother -- whether there are children or not -- are the same qualities that make a good boss.

Wendy Shiba, chief legal officer of PolyOne, married a man with grown children but has no children of her own. She supervises a staff of 25 and agrees that good mothers probably don't learn to be patient and efficient, but have those qualities originally.

On the flip side, "Bad mothers who produce pathology in their kids are likely to be bad managers who produce dysfunction," says Ken Siegel, author of So ... You Call Yourself a Leader, who says the business leaders he has talked to believe mothers to be more patient, but on the downside, too tolerant of underperformance. Siegel says there is a vacuum of scientific research on the mothers vs. non-mothers issue, and it's ripe for a major study.

However, employees do like to hire childless women, who often have a compulsion to work long hours.

"They feel a bigger gap in their lives," says Siegel, an organizational psychologist. Such women are desirable if the employer needs a workhorse, but it spells trouble if those women expect the same workaholism from subordinates, he says.

McKay says that good mothers understand that being a good parent means avoiding favoritism. Why, then, can't they also understand that a good CEO can't consistently demand that childless women pick up the slack when mothers leave for the emergency du jour?

The highest stress levels on the job are found most commonly among women who work full time and who have children under 13, the World Health Organization says. But McKay says she has noticed that granting mothers special treatment never seems to end. Women with teens become active in such things as the prom committee. Women with adult children start to take on responsibilities of parenting grandchildren while their children embark on careers.

It might sound heartless and dictatorial, McKay says, but "the best leaders in my company have been the women with no children."

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