Maternity, a period of transition beginning with prenatal bodily changes and progressing through postnatal lactation, is experienced by up to 66% of working women. Over the past several decades, research on maternity in the workplace has grown exponentially to reveal salient maternity biases that plague women as they navigate their employee and motherhood identities. With the aim of providing information that aids scholars and practitioners in better understanding the experiences of working mothers, we conducted a systematic review of 239 papers on maternity bias (i.e., formal, interpersonal, and internalized). Our interdisciplinary review discusses these three forms of bias and how they might present across different career stages for working mothers. Additionally, we review the antecedents that may drive maternity bias and the outcomes that result for working mothers who perceive or anticipate bias at work. Finally, we discuss areas of previous research aimed at overcoming maternity bias from the perspective of working mothers, their colleagues, and their organization. We conclude by discussing the trends brought to light in our review, the collective strengths and weaknesses of commonly adopted theoretical perspectives of the research reviewed, implications for combating maternity bias for women and their organizations, and recommendations for future research. Our model of maternity bias comprehensively reviews past work to provide insights into the bias that working mothers endure at work but also provides a path forward, as better understanding these biases empower organizations, coworkers, and employees to remediate maternity bias.

Workplace disability accommodations are intended to help level the playing field and create more accessible, inclusive workplaces. Yet, research shows that people with disabilities often experience insufficient accommodations as a result of both employers’ and employees’ attitudes about accommodations. The current work seeks to shed new light on psychological processes underlying disability accommodation request withholding. To do so, we draw upon a relational framework and use social tuning theory to develop a model examining the relationship between inclusive leadership and accommodation request withholding, as mediated by employees’ perceived disability stigma and moderated by disability severity and relational-interdependent self-construal. We tested our model across two studies with Chinese employees—including a survey study with three waves of data from 290 employees with physical disabilities and an experimental-causal-chain designed vignette study with 526 participants. Our findings indicated that inclusive leadership was associated with employees’ lower perceived disability stigma, and that was related to reduced accommodation request withholding. Furthermore, this relationship was more pronounced in employees with higher disability severity and relational-interdependent self-construal. Our research provides novel insights for disability diversity management, particularly around the role of inclusive leadership in fostering enabling workplace environments.