The real costs of the Mommy Track
Equal Pay Day is coming up, so women's economic status is on my mind. We all know there's a wage gap and a glass ceiling. But Joshua Holland at AlterNet has done a great job of laying out less familiar ways that US women get shafted economically.
The real problem facing working women in the U.S. is that we have the most inflexible workplaces in the developed world.According to Harvard's Project on Global Working Families, the United States is one of only five countries out of 168 studied that doesn't mandate some form of paid maternal leave. The only other advanced economy among those five was Australia's, where women are guaranteed an entire year of unpaid leave. That puts the U.S. -- the wealthiest nation on the planet -- in the company of Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland...
I'm not thrilled by the whiff of racism in the "look, we're as backward as little islands and places in Africa on this issue!" rhetorical device there, but it does show how out of step we are with most of the rest of the world. I find it especially ironic that women are punished so heavily for having families; wouldn't you think that all those patriarchs who vote against reproductive choice would want to reward women who choose 'family values' and take leave to stay home with kids or to care for sick family members? But they don't.
Much of the "wage gap" is in fact a baby gap. Karen Kornbluh notes that women without children make 90 percent of what their male counterparts earn, but working mothers earn less than three quarters of what men make. A first child lowers a woman's earnings by an average of 7.5 percent, a second child by 8 percent.It's not so much that women leave the workforce permanently to have kids, it's that when they leave their jobs for a period they can't return. That has a ripple effect across their working lives -- costing them raises, promotions and benefits. According to economist Heather Boushey at the Center for Economic Policy Studies (CEPR), "If women have paid leave they are much more likely to go back to their jobs, and much less likely to quit or switch jobs."
Leaving the workforce temporarily to have a baby or deal with a sick child or parent costs women seniority, raises and any benefits that require a lengthy stay of employment to become vested. Former Clinton advisor Gene Sperling points out that the average time a worker needs to put in to get pension benefits -- if they get them at all in our wonderful "New Economy" -- is five years. Men's average length in the same job is 5.1 years; for women it's under four. According to the AFL-CIO, "Half of all women with income from a pension in 2002 received less than $5,600 per year, compared with $10,340 per year for men."
With our uniquely inflexible workplaces, a third of women work in "non-standard" or part-time jobs with crappy benefits or none at all. All that helps explain why women over 65 are twice as likely to live in poverty than men.
And it's not just maternity leave; according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research, only half of American workers get paid sick leave and only a third get paid leave to care of a sick kid. Forget about paid leave for taking care of an ailing parent.
So if we don't stay home with our kids, we're unfeminine; and if we do so and then return to the workforce, we don't get paid what we're worth. Quite a catch-22. And it's no choice at all for most families these days, who need the incomes of two parents to get by, or for single parents, especially those who will have a harder time collecting child support, thanks to Congress.
What can you do about this? The National Committee on Pay Equity has some great resources. Organize an event for Equal Pay Day, which is April 25 this year. Urge your representatives to support bills that would give teeth to the equal pay laws currently on the books. Tell your friends - not just women, either. Rope in male allies who could afford that XBox 360 or night out with the guys if their wives or girlfriends got paid what they deserve.