Noted Wage Gap Between Working Moms and Working Dads in Management Positions

While women have always struggled for equal pay and equal consideration alongside men in the modern workforce, it seems that working moms are at the most significant disadvantage when it comes to reaping a fair salary, and the higher they climb the corporate ladder, the wider the wage gap becomes. A recent study conducted by the Government Accountability Office (as reported in The New York Times) found that on average, mothers working in management positions, whether at large or small companies, earned about 79 cents to each dollar earned by their male colleagues who happened to be fathers. This wage gap reflects some common (and unfortunate) perceptions about working parents.
Having a family can work in favor of the men trying to get ahead in a corporate environment. Having a growing family at home can make a man appear stable and committed. Conversely, a working mother often has both her commitment and her priorities questioned. Congressman Carolyn Maloney of New York summarized the realities of this disparity bluntly to Moneywatch, stating, "When men become fathers, their pay goes up and when women become mothers, their pay goes down." Despite the attention give to gender issues and anti-discrimination policies in the corporate work environment in recent years, the gender wage gap among men and women in business management positions has remained unchanged for more than a decade.
It is perhaps this disparity, and the underlying misconceptions about gender roles and abilities, that causes many women in leadership and executive positions to opt not to, or at least to postpone, having children. In a very real way, there are many industries in which women may feel they genuinely have to choose between advancing in their careers and building a family. The financial services industry, for example, has seen a reduction of more than 300,000 women in its workforce over the past ten years, while the number of men in the same industry has grown by approximately 90,000.
While many women may leave the job market, or work only part time, in order to stay home and raise a family, women who do make the decision to be working mothers (for any number of reasons) deserve to have that choice available to them, and deserve all the rights and rewards of the male colleagues working alongside them.

New Columbia University Study Provides Good News for Working Moms

Good news for working moms! A recent study by researchers at Columbia University published in this month's Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development shows that children in homes where the mother works during the first year of life don't suffer the setbacks they were previously assumed to have when compared to children who are raised by a stay-at-home parent. The recent study was the most comprehensive evaluation to date of how children are affected by a mother's decision to work outside the home (both full-time or part-time), and included analysis of more than 1,000 children across the United States. The study concluded that while were slight delays in cognitive development noted in children who didn't have a parent around full-time, these delays usually became insignificant after first grade (meaning there was no notable long-term affect on intellectual aptitude) and was generally offset in early years by an improved financial situation (in the two-income household) and increased mother attentiveness, responsiveness and interaction when she was present.

There are few debates that really irk me as much as the "working mom" versus "stay-at-home mom" showdown. This study reinforces the rightness of fit principle: every family is unique and each family situation is different and each family operates differently. The ideal family model should be one in which there is unconditional love, unequivocal respect and unending compassion, encouragement & support. The rest is just mechanics.

Hopefully the findings of this study will enable mothers who do make the decision to work outside the home do so with more empowerment and less guilt, realizing that they can be fully-attuned, present parents in their children's lives.

A Must-Read for Breastfeeding Moms Who Work

One of my favorite books of all time, which I consider a must-read for any nursing mom returning to work at any time during the breastfeeding relationship is Nursing Mother Working Mother by Gale Pryor & Kathleen Huggins.
The working mom guilt can be strong and downright difficult, exhausting & heart-wrenching at times - and this book is GREAT encouragement for women who are new working mommies. You can have an amazing, wonderful, beautiful, strong relationship with your babies while working! Working mamas have been doing it since the beginning of time! :)
I found this book to be an excellent source of validation and encouragement in support of the choice to be a working mom, and it offers wonderful suggestions for how to build, nurture and maintain beautifully attached relationships with your children through practices like breastfeeding, baby-wearing, and on-demand parenting.

My Name is Claire & I'm a Working Mom.....

When my son was born in January of 2009, I didn't quite know what to expect. I was prepared for a massive overhaul of life as I had known it - but didn't yet realize what a transformational effect it would have on every facet of my already complex life. Along with him came an amazing, inexpressible joy and love and peace; life is more wonderful, love is more profound and the world is a more beautiful, beautiful place.

What really took me by surprise is how quickly and naturally I fell into the role of parenting. After those first few weeks filled with hormonally-charged confusion and chaos, everything sort of miraculously and blissfully fell into place. I can't really explain how it happened. I always heard people talk about how "difficult" it is to have kids, or how much "work" it is. And it is. But it doesn't feel like it.

What DOES feel like work is what ended up blindsiding me as the most difficult part of parenting to date: being a working mom. Yikes! Working moms do NOT have it easy. Every single second of every day is filled with the minutiae of trying to stay on top of daily life (or at least not getting too far behind). At times clarity and balance seem nearly impossible to grasp (don't even get me started on laundry and dishes). There are days when I feel raked with guild for leaving my happy little baby at home with his nanny while I run off to the office to tackle the corporate world. There are days when I feel like I fall short. There are days when I feel like I miss the mark entirely. There are plenty of days when I feel over-worked, overwhelmed and vastly under-appreciated; and there are plenty of times when I feel like I'm living in some sort of parallel universe to my single or childless friends.

Would I trade my life for anything? Absolutely not. Never. Could I use a spa day, a chorus of encouragement or a little extra understanding when I flip out a little at the office and hurl my phone across my desk?? MOST DEFINITELY!! :)

So this blog is for all the working moms out there; moms who maybe don't feel they get all the support or all the encouragement or all the understanding they need. This is for moms who spend each day going above and beyond what they ever believed was humanly possible, as they try to find out just how many months or years you can go on three hours of sleep per night before being forcibly institutionalized! This is for moms who might feel disconnected from other moms because they spend their days at work. I've found there just aren't enough resources out there that encourage working moms (although I've found PLENTY that critique working moms or encourage them to find ways to stay home or assume they're selfishly disconnected from their children, which I assure you is NOT the case). So I'm just going to chronicle my experiences... it could come in handy down the road when I'm undergoing intensive psycho-therapy. If readers end up feeling better about their own experience, or feel better understood or gain a sense of humor or solidarity -- that's just icing on the cake (and, OH MAN, do I love icing!!!!!!).