Motherhood is perhaps the most important, and most difficult, job on the planet. While we raise our children out of an innate sense of love and nurturing, we also know that raising happy, healthy children who become productive adults is critical to our future well-being as a nation.
But right now, motherhood in America is at a critical juncture. As women’s roles continue to evolve, more women than ever are in the workforce, and more children than ever are raised in homes without a stay-at-home parent.3 At the same time, public and private policies that affect parenting and the workplace remain largely unchanged. We have a twenty-first century economy stuck with an outdated industrial-era family support structure. The result is that parents, mothers in particular, are struggling to balance the needs of their children with the demands of the workplace.
Being a mom in America today involves prodigious amounts of work at home and, for most mothers, in outside jobs as well. Specifically, among all of the moms in America, almost three-quarters have jobs outside of their homes.4 America’s mothers are working, and working hard. Then, too, America’s mothers are working hard but for less money than men (and less money than women who are not moms). In fact, right now the wage gap between mothers and non-mothers is greater than between women and men—and it’s actually getting bigger. Non-mothers with an average age of thirty earn 10 percent less than their male counterparts; mothers earn 27 percent less; and single mothers earn between 34 percent and 44 percent less.5 “It is well-established that women with children earn less than other women in the United States,” writes Jane Waldfogel of Columbia University in The Journal of Economic Perspectives. “Even after controlling for differences in characteristics such as education and work experience, researchers typically find a family penalty of 10–15 percent for women with children as compared to women without children.”6
What this also means is that it’s still common for women and men to hold the same job and receive different pay. In fact, women lost a cent between 2002 and 2003, according to the U.S. Census, and now make 76 cents to a man’s dollar.7 Most of these wage hits are coming from moms because the lower wages they receive drag down the overall average pay for all women.
The United States has a serious mommy wage gap. Why? Because, as Waldfogel writes, “The United States does at least as well as other countries in terms of equal pay and equal opportunity legislation, but . . . the United States lags in the area of family policies such as maternity leave and childcare.”8 Studies show this mommy wage gap is directly correlated with our lack of family friendly national policies like paid family leave and subsidized childcare. In countries with these family policies in place, moms don’t take such big wage hits.
Speak to mothers across the nation and you will hear that the vast majority of them find they hit an economic “maternal wall” after having children. By all accounts, this wall is why a huge number of professional women leave the workforce, as well as a core reason so many mothers and their children live in poverty. Tragically, statistics from 2001 reveal that in the United States of America—land of opportunity—a full one-quarter of families with children under age six earned less than $25,000 that year.9 An income level that is so low most families of four would qualify for food stamps.10
But mothers across America are not just crying out for better (or at least fair and equal) pay; they are also yearning to live a life in which they aren’t cracking under pressure, a life in which they know that their children will be well cared for, a life in which it’s possible to be at home with their son or daughter even just one afternoon a week without worrying about sacrificing a disproportionate amount of their income and benefits—or simply losing their job altogether.
Some would argue mothers just need to find the proper balance between parenting and career. We believe there is more to it than that.