A shout out to Entrepreneur Magazine Blog for picking up a Denver Post Story about a study showing that companies have biases towards women with children.

In the study, The Motherhood Penalty, (Cornell University Professor Shelley) Correll sent 300 pairs of cover letters and resumes to advertised midlevel marketing positions in an undisclosed Northeastern city. Some of the cover letters mentioned a family, while others made no mention of children. Applicants who didn't mention a family were called in for an interview twice as frequently as those who did. The study found proof that not only are women with children less likely to get hired, their starting salaries are significantly less than similarly qualified fathers or women without children--an average of $11,000 less.

And this is news? No, just the proof of it is.

Recently I helped a friend get a position at a firm where I knew the principals, who were both men. She already had a small child, and they'd agreed to flexible hours. She worked from home but was enormously structured, starting work at 5am to begin sales calls on the East Coast and taking breaks in the middle of the day to be with her daughter.

The situation was working well, until she got pregnant again. Her voice was low and secretive when she called.

"I'm pregnant," she nearly whispered.

"Congratulations!" I said. She didn't sound as happy as I was for her.

"Thanks," she said. "I haven't said anything yet to my boss."

Sadly that is often what women think upon hearing such news--how do I make it look like having another life in the house won't have any effect on my work performance?

I happened to be at my sister's place when I found out she was pregnant with her second child. She took a much more guarded stance and started to plot the next year at her job teaching at a university--if she'd have to take time off, how she'd manage her already outrageous commute while lactating, and, not least important, how to approach the head of the department with this news.

A friend in the know explained to me that academia is not the family-friendly place we assume it to me. Hard-core academics must be ready to take off to wherever they can get a tenure-track position, not hunker down in one place (code for: raise families). My sister told me that, of all the women her age in her department, none had children, but the men did.

As it turns out, my sister was granted some flexibility during the semester she's giving birth, and can take off the semester after that, with no pay. She was ecstatic about the news--at least she would keep her job. She didn't expect compensation.

However, then she learned that she would lose credit toward tenure--not her boss's decision, but a state university policy for people who take time off.

This policy might as well read this way: "No tenure for women who take time off to have kids". Does getting pregnant negate the years that my sister has been teaching, or the years she spent getting published, another factor determined when establishing tenure?

The fact is, though policies may have opened up for women in the workplace who have families, we are still penalized for having them.

This isn't the case across the board. My friend, who had her second child, had no problems incorporating her new addition into her work life. She was even granted a promotion--requiring her to spend more time in the office. My friend didn't mind less flexibility, however she would have minded if her employer assumed that because she had a family she could not handle the responsibilities of a new job. Clearly her promotion was not contingent on her family situation.

One of my best friends has four kids and, while she was married, was the primary breadwinner. Her career never sputtered around any of the births.

I met two women who started their own business as a means of creating unlimited career opportunites while allowing them the flexibility of, say, taking off part of the morning to get the kids to school, or leaving early for a concert.

I'm seeing all kinds of solutions for women with families, and yet the Cornell study suggests differently. What are the factors that allow some women to have it all, and others to have it at a price?