Give Your Mom a Flexible Workplace and Paid Time Off for Mother’s Day
Among the many sacrifices parents make their children, one of the biggest problems for working families is the financial blow to a mother’s lifetime earnings.
A working paper published in January from Princeton University found that “having children in the long run creates a gender income gap of about 20 percent, which is roughly equal in terms of labor force participation, working hours and wage rates.” … (Although this study used data from Denmark, the wage gap in the country is ” almost the same ” as in America.) There is a wage gap, and much of it can be attributed to maternity.
This is consistent with previous research from the United States comparing wages for men and women, which showed that although childless women earn similarities to men (although there is still a disparity), mothers earn significantly less. These two reports show that the gap widens most for women in their 30s or during childbearing years. Another report by Michelle Badig, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, showed that every time a woman has a child, her earnings are reduced by four percent. The situation is even worse for low-income women, who bear the largest maternity penalty. (Dad, meanwhile, sees a pay rise of about six percent per child, with those at the top gaining the most.)
One of the reasons this is happening – the Budig report says it accounts for one-third of the pay gap – is because women take more time to work when they have children than men, or switch to part-time work. or for a low-paying job. The rest, studies show , can be explained by bias towards mothers compared to fathers. Employers assume that they will be less committed to their work despite no real difference in actual work ethics . Joan K. Williams, a distinguished professor at the University of California, Hastings College of Law, found that while women entrepreneurs are considered competent, “working mothers are judged not so much as women entrepreneurs, but as housewives, who, to quote the terms used by researchers, are considered as on a par with the “elderly, blind, mentally retarded and disabled.”
The international consortium Executive Development Research, a recruiting company, released a report in 2016 that found that the main reason women report leaving jobs at age 30 was not because they had a child, but rather, because they took a job with a higher salary. Their bosses, meanwhile, believed the real reason was that their female employees were struggling to achieve work-life balance by exposing a boss and employee gap.
Research has shown time and time again that having a baby is an indicator that a woman’s wages can change for a lifetime. And this is a problem not only for the mother, but also for her spouse, children and society.
So how can you help solve the problem? One way would be to introduce paid parental leave in the US, or at least some better policy than what we have now. According to the National Compensation Survey (NCS), just 14 percent of civilian workers had access to paid family leave in 2016, and one in four mothers returns to work within 10 days of giving birth. This needs to be changed, and men and women should be encouraged to embrace it.
But that doesn’t solve anything, a Danish study found – Denmark is offering generous paid vacations. Claire Cain Miller, in The New York Times , suggests that companies could put “ less priority on long hours and long faces,” and the government could provide subsidized childcare. Flexibility is really key .
Another possible solution, as the authors of the ICEDR report wrote, is “to focus on what matters most: pay women fairly, offer them learning and development opportunities, and provide them with meaningful work.”