Back in 2002, months after being laid off from a television producing job, I secured an interview for an editorial position in the communications department of an Ivy League college. The most memorable part of the exchange between my 30-something female interviewer and me went something like this:

Me: What are the hours for this position?

Interviewer: Well, my daughter is in kindergarten and I leave at 3:30 every day so that I can spend time with her. You will be expected to stay until 5 p.m. or occasionally later if it’s a deadline day. You’re single, right?

I nodded, speechless. I didn’t realize my marital status could have a bearing on my work schedule. She had made a judgment, announcing rank based not on a supervisor-subordinate relationship but a married-trumps-single hierarchy. My “non-work” life consisting of taking evening classes, dining with friends, visiting my parents and dating was clearly a notch below parenting responsibilities.

As a journalist who loved covering girls and women’s athletics for over a decade because it felt good to give them well-deserved coverage, and as a strident feminist who never felt comfortable with the traditional female roles dictated by my Italian-American upbringing, I had always been thrilled to hear when workplaces made a point of being flexible to accommodate family needs. But this experience brought home for me just how nuanced this whole discussion of flexible workplaces really is.

It got me thinking about ‘women vs. women’ instead of the typical ‘men vs. women’ scenario we always think of when we talk about workplace gender issues. For example, we always hear that women are making approximately 77 cents to a man’s dollar, but I wondered, how is a mother faring against a non-mother in that scenario? What are the differences in companies’ treatment of mothers vs. non-mothers overall?

Leave it to Maria Shriver to delve into this in the recently released The Shriver Report, A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything. Cited in the report is a study by Cornell University sociologists Shelley Correll, Stephen Benard and In Paik to find out if being a mother means being paid less, all else equal.

“Study participants evaluated application materials for a pair of job candidates that were explicitly equally qualified … but one person was identified as a parent and the other was not,” the report states. “Their findings are astonishing: Even though the job candidates identified as mothers had the same credentials as (those who were not mothers), they were perceived to be less competent, less promotable, less likely to be recommended for hire, and had lower recommended starting salaries.”

Shriver’s report goes on to explain that a study by sociologists Michele Budig at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Paula England at Stanford University confirms the motherhood pay penalty.

“Interruptions from work, working part-time, and decreased seniority/experience explain no more than about one-third of the gap in pay between women with and without children, and that ‘mother-friendly’ job characteristics explained very little of the gap,” the report says.

The “women vs. women” idea also brings me to disturbing behavior in our society that I witness almost daily as an objective outsider who is childless by choice. Mothers are a tough crowd. I constantly hear mothers in my life feeling judged or harshly judging each other over staying home to raise their children or not, breast feeding or not, natural childbirth or not, vaccines or not, enough help from husbands or not, spacing between children, etc. The list is endless. The measuring is endless.

For the most part, men do not do this to each other.

What the feminist movement blessedly did was give women choices and open doors. But someone forgot to tell us to treat each other with more compassion and understanding when we actually make those choices. Suzanne might be bored out of her mind staying home to raise her child; Joanne might think it’s the greatest gift of her life. Is either choice wrong? It’s hard to believe we’re still having that conversation, but I hear women sniping about each other on this topic all the time.

I suppose we’re still on that cusp of having more women in the workplace but not quite having a collective attitude of accepting that it’s a good shift that will get easier over time as the younger generations grow up. I remember being at a wedding years ago and hearing a female sports coach tell a story of announcing her pregnancy to her female supervisor only to hear this – “I’ll never hire a woman of child-bearing age again.”

Wow. Women vs. women. Tough stuff.

This is by no means to lump all women into the category of this supervisor or my Ivy League interviewer. I have worked for a single woman who was a workaholic and expected everyone else to be, several married women who inspired me every day and never made an issue of whose life was more “important” outside of work, and men who ran the gamut. The point is, no man I ever worked for expected anything of me based on whether I was leaving work to tend to a child or to attend a book club.

Not a scientific study, I know, but thought-provoking nonetheless.