By day, many working women are winning. They’re leading countries, companies, teams, running businesses and breadwinning. By night, those same women, many of whom are mothers, caregivers and/or bearing some invisible workload, are struggling to feel the support and inclusion Corporate America has promised.
Women are working within structures that weren’t built with them in mind, and that haven’t adequately evolved to suit despite the fact that U.S. workforce participation for women age 25 to 54 hovered around the 75 percent mark in 2022. While there may be new commitments around C-suite seats, greater board representation and mentoring opportunities for women — all critical to equity and progress — support also looks like paid family leave, flexibility and child care aid.
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And it’s not about women finding the right balance between work and home life — a burden men are rarely, if ever, asked to bear — but about creating company cultures with innovative leadership where support benefits the employee and not just the business, and where the gender pay gap isn’t widened by motherhood.
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Women, mothers or not, still make just 83 cents for every dollar a man makes, a figure that’s fairly well documented. But mothers only make 58 cents for every dollar a father makes, according to the American Association of University Women — it’s a phenomenon known as the motherhood penalty.
“One of the primary causes of the gender pay gap is motherhood, and bias against mothers is the strongest form of gender bias against women in the workplace,” said Liz Morris, deputy director of the Center for WorkLife Law, where she leads a legal team flighting for gender and racial justice in the workplace and in education.
“If you look at the pay gap, for example, it essentially doesn’t exist until a woman has a child, so a lot of the inequities in the workplace can be attributed to motherhood,” Morris added.
The motherhood penalty’s existence underscores bias against working moms, said Reshma Saujani, founder and chief executive officer of Girls Who Code, which educates girls in computer science, and founder of Moms First, an organization advocating for policies that value women’s labor in and out of the home.
“There’s a stigma against working mothers — it’s not a stigma against working parents, it’s against working mothers,” Saujani said. “Men make 6 percent more for every child that they have and women lose 4 percent for every child.”
Saujani is also the author of “Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work (And Why It’s Different Than You Think),” which calls for a shift in business, policy and societal expectations that would make workplaces work for women. In it, she says educating working women, educating corporate leaders, revising narratives about what success looks like and advocating for policy reform are the four key steps in creating equity for women at work.
Policy reform will come in many forms. One recent example is the PUMP Act.
Morris, through the Center for WorkLife Law, helped draft legislation for the Providing Urgent Maternal Protections for Nursing Mothers, or PUMP Act, which was signed into law in December and expands workplace protections for employees who need to express breast milk. Under the law, employers have to provide a private (non-bathroom) space for pumping, and time spent doing so must be considered hours worked if the employee is also working.
“These bills that are addressing motherhood are wonderful steps in the right direction,” Morris said. “We desperately need paid family leave. We desperately need protection from discrimination against family caregivers. There’s a lot more that can be done. And even with these new legal rights, women who are working in low-wage jobs, immigrants, folks who have less power in the workplace are still going to face discrimination, and low-wage workers and women of color are most likely to face discrimination.”
A study released on Aug. 15, which happens to be Moms’ Equal Pay Day, found that women spend twice as much time caregiving for household members and extended family than men — to the tune of 153 additional hours of unpaid care each year, or roughly four work weeks. In dollars, according to the National Partnership for Women & Families, that’s $4,600 of uncompensated caregiving per woman each year, compared to $2,300 per man.
“It’s clear that care work is valuable labor, but we rarely treat it as such,” Jocelyn Frye, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families, said in a statement. “The additional unpaid caregiving that women perform, combined with longstanding gender-based pay disparities, mean that too many women are unable to achieve economic stability at a time when mothers are increasingly breadwinners, especially Black and Latina moms.”
Pay is still a major problem for women in general. And while two-thirds of working mothers were also breadwinners before the pandemic, according to the Center for American Progress, reports from February this year show men out earn women in every age group, and women’s earnings plateau mid-career, while men’s continue to climb (these gaps are widest for women of color), with women age 65 or older earning 27 percent less than men of the same age.
Fathers with children age five or younger are 39 percent more likely to remain working, compared to the mothers in those households.
And taking time out of the workforce today has steeper penalties than it used to, according to a study from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research released in 2019. “For those who took just one year off from work, women’s annual earnings were 39 percent lower than women who worked all 15 years between 2001 and 2015, a much higher cost than women faced in the time period beginning in 1968, when one year out of work resulted in a 12 percent cut in earnings,” the institute said in the report.
The facts are largely underreported — and overwhelmingly, are tied into child care.
In some cases, child care costs can be untenable for families and, more often than not, that means the mother will opt out of work, willingly or otherwise. According to the Department of Labor’s National Database of Childcare Prices, care for one infant child in 2022 ranged from $8,310 to $17,171 a year, on average, depending on location in the U.S. In places like New York City, infant care for one child can easily run upward of $25,000 a year. While the numbers shrink as children age, costs for school age kids still run between $5,890 and $10,245 a year, on average.
“Child care in the U.S. is broken, and we know that women are the ones paying the price,” Saujani said. “The vast majority of women work to work, and the lack of quality, affordable child care is pushing women out of the workforce and limiting opportunities for advancement.”
Saujani said that while the problem cannot be solved without public-sector investment, the private sector has an opportunity — and incentive — to step up.
“We know that companies that offer child care benefits see better recruitment, productivity and retention. And right now, we’re going through a very tight labor market. There’s like 9.8 million jobs and moms are shopping, so child care benefits are a competitive advantage,” Saujani said.
In an effort to center child care as an essential business issue, Moms First launched the National Business Coalition for Child Care. In partnership with the Skimm, one of the coalition’s efforts was the #ShowUsYourChildCare campaign, which calls on companies to “show up for their employees and open up about their child care policies.”
While many companies don’t offer any child care benefits, some are doing a minimum, offering Dependent Care FSA’s with maximum input that can hardly cover two months’ care in big cities.
Others are doing much more. “There are tech companies and companies that have highly trained professional workforces that are doing all sorts of amazing things, like shipping breast milk across the country, or paying for fertility treatments, and providing six months of paid leave,” Morris said.
Some companies start the benefits long before child care. At Cisco, an IT company topping Great Place to Work’s 2021 Best Workplaces for Parents list, employees have access to up to $20,000 in reimbursement for adoption or surrogacy costs and up to $50,000 for IVF or freezing eggs. As part of Comcast’s Parental Leave benefit, the primary caregiver gets 16 weeks off plus a phase-back-to-work option. At Flatiron Health, employees receive 16 weeks parental leave with full pay in addition to, rather than concurrent with, short-term disability benefits. When that leave ends, parents can work two abbreviated work weeks (60 percent of their scheduled hours) at full pay to help with the transition back, and for a full year after a child arrives, they can work remotely for 20 percent of the workweek with flexible working hours. They can also expense the cost of bringing the child and an additional caregiver along on a business trip.
Those on the innovative end of leadership get it, Saujani added.
“We’re really proud of one of our partners, Fast Retailing [Japanese parent company of Theory, J Brand, Uniqlo and others]. They’re a member of our National Business Coalition on Childcare…they implemented a child care stipend that reimburses employees, including store managers, up to $1,000 per month…and they’re going to be announcing an expansion to this benefit, increasing the duration of the stipends and increasing the child’s age eligibility. So they get it. And when they go from store to store to store and talk to managers, they know that a pain point for women in retail is child care and they’re doing something about it.”
Support and benefits are substantially less palpable for mothers on the low-wage end of the workforce. “We’ve been seeing companies that are giving small amounts of paid leave to their hourly workers, and it’s extremely rare,” Morris said. “When you’re thinking about accommodations for lactation and pregnancy, we think it will be more common now because it’s legally mandated. And, of course, one of the most important things that companies can do for women is to pay them well above the minimum wage.”
Making workplaces work for working mothers is also about consideration for the things that may be less tangible, like their mental health and wellness, where realities like postpartum anxiety and depression are of rising concern. As is mom guilt.
“It’s so pervasive, it’s shocking that we even have a name for it. And for every mom I know, guilt is like their baseline. And every day in America, living in America, working in America, feels like some new opportunity to fail,” Saujani said. “And look, rooting out mom guilt isn’t something that we should be having moms do to snap their fingers. It takes structural change. When you’re going to start feeling like, ‘Oh my God, I had a bad day, I’m a bad mom, I didn’t do this, I didn’t do that,’ you think it’s your fault. It’s not your fault, it’s the structure’s fault; you are set up to fail.”
Saujani suggested starting with a conversation around structures.
“We live in a country that doesn’t have paid leave — nearly one in four employed mothers return to work within two weeks of giving birth. We live in a country that doesn’t have affordable child care, 40 percent of parents are in debt because of child care,” Saujani said. “Now’s the time when we have to point our attention toward making structural change and take it off of the current conversation, which is all about, ‘let me build your confidence, let me teach you how to color code your calendar, let me get you a mentor. We’re good. We’re fine. We’re not the problem.’”
As mothers return to the workforce, they are “shopping” for jobs in industries and companies that offer flexibility and remote work, Saujani noted.
While the number of women in the workforce has broadly increased since the pandemic forced many out to focus on child care, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows they’re favoring industries and jobs where there’s a general expectation of greater flexibility. The number of women age 20 and older in computer and mathematical occupations (read: tech jobs), for example, was up nearly 20 percent in 2022 compared to 2019, while the number of women in sales and office jobs, the kind that, largely, must be done onsite, was down 8 percent in the same period.
So what does innovative corporate leadership look like when it comes to putting moms first? For Saujani, that looks like “a world where you can become a mother without losing your economic freedom.”
“To me, freedom is the ability to go in and out of the workforce without penalty. And to recognize that, again, women can’t work unless they have paid leave and child care. And women should not only be able to work, but they should be able to be mothers. I should be able to see my child walk, crawl, talk, dance — I shouldn’t get fired,” she said. “We’ve got to get people seeing this as an issue that moves away from the margins into the mainstream. It’s something that we talk about with our girlfriends and we don’t think that it’s something that I should be having a conversation with my employer about, with my Congressperson about it, but it is.”