When their need to provide care and their need for paid employment are equally important, mothers try to combine both roles, often through part time employment, or to stagger these competing needs by taking employment breaks. Using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics of Australia (HILDA) Survey1 this article analyses the resulting detriments to the ability of mothers to continue career paths across the occupational spectrum. Analysis of this data is used to argue that employment disadvantage is generated by mothers' inability to conform to `ideal worker' behaviour and therefore can be construed as `systemic discrimination'. Norms of `ideal' behaviour are shown to be stronger in occupations of high status and as a result mothers are at a greater risk of becoming excluded from employment within these occupations. Further, 26 percent of Australian working mothers will experience occupational exclusion, an event where further employment is secured only by moving down the occupational hierarchy to jobs of lower socio-economic status.
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