Today, it is not uncommon for a woman to have a job and be a parent. It has become a norm in American culture for women to receive a higher education and then to find a job. More and more, women are encouraged to wait until they are financially stable before getting married and raising a family. While being a “working mom” is definitely acceptable in our culture, working mothers encounter more setbacks in terms of wages and the job market.
Research has shown that there are many benefits to an employed married woman such as good marriage quality, children with less behavioral problems, and better mental health (due to a reduced risk of depression.) Stay at home mothers tend to have a higher chance of divorce and higher risk of depression. Also, women who returned to work soon after having a child reported more satisfaction with their lives. Today, almost two-thirds of married mothers employed. In addition, women are the sole or main breadwinner in 40 percent of households with children under the age of 18.
However, studies have also found that working mothers make 7%-14% less money per year than childless woman. This is obviously particularly alarming because the women with children have more than just themselves to support. A wide variety of factors contributes to this unfortunate phenomenon. This is most commonly explained as occurring because women who do not work for several years suffer because miss out on adding experience to their resume and getting contacts that can help them get ahead; therefore getting a promotion/raise often takes longer than it would for a childless woman. Also, woman may opt to take lesser paying jobs that allow them to spend more time with their families; for example, a lawyer working for a non-profit firm rather than a huge company or working for a high school as opposed to a large, public research university. It has been found that universally among American woman, decisions about employment are made based on the effect it would have on their families. It is also been found that women that want to have children sooner may hold off on getting the highest education possible, which results in them not having the highest paying job possible.
Yet there are also factors contributing to this wage gap that are beyond the control of working mothers. “We often see women returning from maternity leave who are given less work or dead end assignments,” Dina Bakst, head of the advocacy group A Better Balance, told NPR. “And this type of discrimination really drags down wages for women because they get off track, and even worse off and pushed out of the workforce.” A Better Balance study found that a CEO is more likely to assign a 20-something year old woman without a family a slightly higher salary or more career-boosting assignments than a middle-aged mother of four, because they thinks the former will work harder.
In a 2012 study by researchers Matthias Krapf at the University of Zurich, Heinrich W. Ursprung at the University of Konstanz, and Christian Zimmermann at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, found that working mothers are no less productive than childless women. The study had a sample size of 10,000 women. All the women had children, were considered “white-collar”, and worked in fields related to economics and business. The marital status of the women varied. The sooner it was after a woman had a child, the less productive she would be; but after about a year or so, her productivity would return to normal or even increase.
The socioeconomic status of women is also something to consider. Single, lower class mothers without a college education are found to suffer the most from the wage gap between childless and non-childless women. Fifty-eight percent of working families headed by women were low-income in 2012, according to a report released this week by the Working Poor Families Project. The less of an education the mother had, the more likely the family was to be low-income. The problem is made worse by the fact these women are in industries like retail, food service, and home healthcare that typically offer few benefits and little opportunity for advancement. In addition, the problem is further aggravated by the wage-gap between men and women and the lack of affordable childcare. It is common for women to spend about 1/3 of their income on childcare.
So what can be done about this? It would make sense that those who need the money more should receive it. Still, the issue is more complex than that. Is this only an issue of wage? Or should the issue of childcare not be addressed as well?
Sources:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/the-mommy-track-myth/283557/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/coontz-the-triumph-of-the-working-mother.html?_r=0
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/14/working-moms-study_n_4782062.html
Equality in the workplace is essential. Women have made major advances in their workforce roles, which is fair and respectable. In some cases though, it can be the right choice for a woman to stay home and run the family. In this case especially, I think that these women should receive financial benefits for what they do. The role of a mother is sacred and women should not have to suffer for choosing to spend their time and efforts raising their children instead of participating fully in the workforce. A single mother should not have to suffer for bringing life into the world.
There is no doubt that women have made great strides away from the typical “housewife” stereotype of decades past. However, there still is a struggle for them to become equal in the workplace. Attributing this, as you did, to the experience that they miss when having children is something that I had not considered. I honestly would have assumed it to be more of the socioeconomic status of typical single mothers. If missed experience is the reason for this discrepancy, it’s going to be a difficult issue to solve. It’s not as if working mothers can just not be the ones to have children. I didn’t realize that such a significant gap existed, so I think that this is a really great topic choice.
That’s an interesting subject you bring up. I feel women, especially working mothers have been getting a lot of attention with comments made by Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer who wants to end a “work from home” stigma. I think it’s understandable that a woman would be less productive in first year after having a child, because that’s the year where the baby would need the most attention, and always needed to have a plan to be looked after. Especially if it’s the woman’s first child, there will be the added stress of not knowing what o expect. It’s also interesting to note that the U.S. is basically the only industrialized nation that doesn’t offer paid maternity leave. Even in Saudi Arabia a woman can take two months off with 50% pay!