(In)justice Dynamics Around Maternity Leave: How Push and Pull Factors Intertwine to Create Career Disadvantagesfor Mothers

Maternity leave and motherhood are typically associated with severe career penalties for women. Some literature suggests that this may be due to women opting out (i.e., pull dynamics), while other studies show that mothers may be pushed out by organizations (i.e., push dynamics). We adopt an organizational justice lens to investigate push and pull dynamics around maternity leave. Through a four-wave interview study with 35 highly educated women in France (134 interviews), we investigate their personal (un)fairness experiences at work as well as their changing career and work-life priorities and choices. Using a contemporary approach to grounded theory, we find that injustice events and inactions interlink to form injustice episodes, which often change and extend over time. Injustice episodes (push factors) and changing career and work-life priorities (pull factors) are found to influence each other and to exert both direct and indirect effects on career withdrawal over time, illustrating how pushes and pulls intertwine to create career disadvantages for women when they become mothers. This research highlights the important role of organizational justice in gender equality at work and, more generally, how motivated justice dynamics unfold in career transitions.