Why working moms in America are so miserable
As we near the three-year anniversary of the pandemic, it feels like the spotlight has dimmed on the crisis that working mothers have been dealing with for generations. So is the chance to make meaningful change really closing? Are we doomed to keep pushing this boulder up the hill forever?
After working on a project featuring candid conversations between mothers and daughters called “Ambition Diaries,” and hearing how little things have changed over the last few generations, I was interested to talk to Jessica Grose, New York Times opinion writer and author of the new book Screaming on the inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood. Grose has been chronicling modern motherhood for several years and spoke to nearly 100 mothers for her book, so I started by asking about the most common experiences she heard from working mothers.
She said the biggest commonality she found was the impossible logistics, no matter the person’s job. “The reality of their children’s lives rarely lined up with the expectations they had from work. Something as simple as the fact that the school day does not match up with a typical work day is an immediate conflict that you have to solve as an individual,” she said. “A lot of working parents are surprised at how difficult and individualized every solution needs to be.” The other universal experience she said she heard was feeling like they were not succeeding the way they wanted to at work or at home.
The motherhood pay gap
Grose pointed out that the pay gap between white men and white women is narrow, but widens significantly for BIPOC women and even more for mothers. “When you become a mother, you are seen as less competent. You are less likely to be hired, and less likely to get a promotion over time,” she said. In fact, she points to one shocking statistic in her book: Mothers are, on average, 100% less likely to get a callback for a job and are offered $11,000 less when they do get a job offer.
The impacts of the motherhood penalty reverberate through a woman’s career in the form of less retirement savings and lifetime earnings. But there’s also a big impact on families and the economy.
The “ideal worker”
This bias against mothers at work stems in part from what gender scholar Joan Williams calls “the ideal worker.” It’s the unspoken expectation that employees should work without any indication of their life outside of work. It’s an impossible standard, but, as Grose points out, when you are a caregiver, it’s harder because you have someone else’s illnesses to contend with. “Even very privileged parents can’t throw money at that problem. You can’t get a babysitter to care for a sick kid,” Grose explains.
The lack of paid sick leave is an issue that has been at the heart of a lot of recent labor disputes, but, as Grose points out in her book, it’s not something that just impacts low-wage workers. Many in the medical field, for instance, work as independent contractors or run their own private practices and lack paid leave of any kind.
Individual problems with structural solutions
One solution to the problems that Grose outlines in her book is the notion of “radical flexibility,” or allowing employees to work the hours that work best for them, like taking time off in the afternoon and logging back on in the evenings. That is, of course, a solution that will only work for certain types of jobs. What’s really needed is a policy change on a government level, including paid leave, and universal childcare. These are, Grose points out, not just “women’s issues” or “mom’s issues.”
“Things like paid leave are actually tremendously popular among all variety of people. I talked to a pollster who said that, for example, rural Republican men want paid leave.” She gave an example of a man who was working to convince his local lawmakers and local community to take up paid leave laws after his lack of paid time off left him unable to care for his wife after her C-section. “These ideas need spokespeople that are not the predictable spokespeople, because we are easy to dismiss if you don’t agree with us,” Grose says.
Listen to the episode for more of what she heard from the mothers she interviewed for her book, including about their experiences with pregnancy discrimination. Grose also shares her insights on the small window where professional women are least likely to face age discrimination—or as she calls it, “the hour between babe and hag.”
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