So What, Who Cares (vol 2, issue 32) Who gets penalized in the workplace for parenthood

Hello! I want to open this newsletter by thanking So What, Who Cares? reader @kirschen, who was kind enough to point me to this fantastic Audobon magazine feature profiling eight different owl species. This article also features a rare case of "the comments are worth reading," with my personal favorite being "them birds look crazy af I like the 4th one."

Owls are definitely my kind of bird. Do you have a favorite flying, feathered friend? (Or non-flying, if the ratites are your jam?) Make the case for your bird via Twitter or email.

*
This headline is admirably stark: "The Motherhood Penalty vs. the Fatherhood Bonus." The upshot is simple: If you're a mother, expect to earn less than any of your other colleagues, be they male or (child-free) female. Childless, unmarried women earn 96 cents for every dollar a man earns, while married mothers earn 76 cents.

So what? The pay gap is not rooted in performance at all. Remember, economists have found that working mothers are actually more productive in the workplace compared to other employees (vol 1, issue 45). Rather, people feel comfortable discriminating against mothers:

“A lot of these effects really are very much due to a cultural bias against mothers,” said Shelley J. Correll, a sociology professor at Stanford University and director of the school’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research.

Correll conducted research asking would-be employers what salaries they'd offer job applicants: mothers were offered on average $11,000 less than childless women and $13,000 less than fathers.

For a more anecdotal look at the bias against mothers in the workplace, feel free to read Katharine Zaleski's admission that she freely and frequently discriminated against mothers in the workplace until she was one.

The story is illustrative for what it teaches about some managers --as in, how freely some managers buy into the myth that visibly long hours equal productivity (vol 2, issue 24) and how some managers are unable to perceive the real workload of their team, since an estimated 45% of working mothers go back to work after the kids go to bed (vol 2, issue 11).

Who cares? Are you a working mother or partnered to one? There might be grounds to get miffy about how your household is losing out on income thanks to persistent bias against professional women who had the nerve to reproduce.

*
Live by the trend, die by the trend: Tar-Zhay -- which enjoyed a tremendous success during the Aughties and the masstige trend of chic luxury at discount prices -- put a foot wrong during the recession by losing the chic and emphasizing the cheap. And now it's struggling financially. Emphasizing cheap basics wasn't the only misstep: Target's relaunch of its website was a hot mess, there was that massive security breach in fall 2013 (which has cost the company $252 million so far), and their foray into Canada was a disaster. And now, the business is press is beginning to notice that holy carp, Target's either going to be a turnaround story in 2015 or it's going to continue spiraling.

So what? Expect to see Target upping its digital game: In order to hang in a world where Amazon Prime is gaining ground (50 million members and climbing), it's going to have to figure out how make it easy for people to shop in stores, on internet browsers or on smartphone apps.

Who cares? Are you outside of the minivan-driving suburban mom demographic? Then you're about to get wooed by Target.

Says new CEO Brian Cornell, "Our guest is going to be increasingly a Hispanic shopper," and the company is also putting its expansion efforts this year into smaller, urban outposts. The Target Express stores generally have higher average sales per store and higher gross margins than a traditional Target store, suggesting that urban shoppers are where the money is at.

*

Today's moment in pop culture brackets: Let's start with Ars Technica's Hacker Movie Madness. They've selected 16 movies in the nerd canon, grouping them in conferences ranging from sweet 1990s fashion to AIs who only want to play a game.

And then, thrill to Tor.com's definitive ranking of 1980s fantasy movies. The countdown begins with Cave Dwellers -- one of the best Mystery Science Theater episodes EVER -- and does not skimp on the photos of heroes with abundant, feathered hair. The whole list is fun to read, because Leah Schnelbach is a very funny writer..

(And you can rent the Cave Dwellers episode of MST3K for $3 on: YouTube, iTunes, or Amazon Streaming. How much Keefe is in this movie? Miles O'Keefe.)

*

Did you miss an issue of So What, Who Cares? The archive is here. Are there typos? I apologize in advance.

As always, I welcome your feedback and suggestions via email or Twitter. Always let me know what you think about So What, Who Cares? If you really like it, tell a friend to subscribe.