The 36-Hour Day
with Amy Urquhart
I’m Amy and I’ve spent the last three years trying to strike that perfect balance between being a wife, mom and professional career woman. I’ve decided that I’ll never perfect the art of “having it all”, but this blog is a chronicle of my attempts to continue to do so. I’m a blogger (my personal blog about Canadian home life is Hearts into Home), gardener, college instructor, wife to Graham and mom to Nate. If you’re also a working mom who finds there just aren’t enough hours in the day, I hope you’ll enjoy this column!
Read her blog at Hearts into Home.
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This week, I had the opportunity to talk to some amazing women about the White House’s recent report, “Women in America: Indicators of Social and Economic Well-Being.”
It’s the first comprehensive federal report since 1963, when President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, was released, and pulls together data from a variety of sources and studies, offering a big-picture view of the issues women face today, and how women’s lives in the United States has changed over time.
One of the things that hasn’t changed much is that, in spite of all of our gains in education and in the workforce, women on average still earn less than men for doing comparable work. I asked White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, the chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls, and Preeta Bansal, General Counsel and Senior Policy Adviser at the Office of Management and Budget in the Executive Office of the President, why they think that’s still the case. (You can see the whole interview here.)
Here’s what they had to say:
“Well, there are a variety of reasons, a variety of different factors,” Jarrett told me. “We have to encourage our young girls to go into fields that lead to profitable careers.”
Women who work outside the home tend to spend more of their “free” time on family and volunteer work, while men tend to spend theirs on sports and leisure activities, the report found. “Women are still carrying the burden of family,” Jarret pointed out. “Women aren’t able to spend as much time as work [as men] because they have all these other commitments and responsibilities. And then another factor is that we still have discrimination in the workplace.” The discrimination isn’t as simple as men vs. women or black vs. white; thanks to what researchers call <a href=”http://workitmom.com/bloggers/36hourday/2009/06/22/the-motherhood-penalty-its-not-just-about-pay/”>”The Motherhood Penalty,”</a> women with children earn an average of $11,000 less in starting salary than women without kids.
To encourage change, “part of what we’ve been doing here at the White House, as part of the Council of Women and Girls, is to highlight best practices.” Jarrett said. “Employers who have flexibility in the workplace are more productive.”
It’s no surprise to many of us that, in this day and age, a flexible workplace is a family-friendly workplace. With more and more fathers focused on achieving work-life balance, maybe there’s a chance that flexibility could become the norm, rather than just a perk? “Flex work schedules aren’t only about women, it’s about families and the choices they’re making,” said Bansal. “There’s a role both for government and laws, and there’s a role for the private sector… the private sector is recognizing more and more that retaining women is about competitiveness.”
Readers, why do you think the wage gap still exists? Is it something that needs legislation to fix, is it a work place issue, or is it simply a societal thing?
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Well, I agree that his is a complex issue. I wonder if there is any way they can analyze it by first excluding all the cases where women frankly should earn less, and then analyze the remaining situations.
How do professional women who do NOT spend a lot of time on family responsibilities compare to men in their fields?
I think women’s own choices lead to lower salaries for them (as a group) in the following situations:
1) When they choose a field that is known for being lower-paying for the education level, such as teaching. They know going in that the pay won’t be great, so clearly they saw other benefits that they found more important than the pay.
2) When they take extended time off to care for their children. Naturally this leads to less professional experience, and those who take little or no time off for “family” should be paid for the additional experience.
3) When they choose jobs that are straight 8-hour jobs (or less). Working more than 40 hours per week is necessary if you want to make the big bucks in most cases.
4) When they choose jobs that structure compensation relatively more heavily on “benefits” (including time off) and less on take-home pay.
There are probably others that I’m not thinking of at the moment.
I do believe that discrimination is a factor, but I’ve never seen data that tells me how much of a factor it really is, when you take out non-discriminatory factors like the above. If it’s just a few cents on the dollar, then frankly, I’d rather save my sense of outrage for bigger things.
I was a single, childless employee until I was 41. I was never unemployed for a single day since my 2nd year of grad school (20+ years). I usually had 2 jobs, and I worked long hours (60-100/week) all the time. I never used the majority of my “vacation” or “sick” time. There were times when business travel was 50% of my life. I put a lot of time into “networking,” etc. which were basic professional requirements of my job. I had my MBA, law license, and CPA by the age of 28 and had to do a significant amount of continuing education to keep those current. If I’d had kids during those years, I could not have done as much to add value for my employers / professional development. Should I have earned more than a woman who had done less professionally (all other things being equal)? Yes. Did I? Yes. Did I earn as much as a similarly-qualified man? Probably not, but then, I was an extreme introvert, and I worked in an extroverted man’s field. I most certainly earned more than most men of my age.
So is money important enough to women that they should postpone motherhood? If I’d been married, my life story would probably look a lot different, because I really wanted to be a mom earlier rather than later. I wanted to have a houseful of kids, and while I probably would have worked, I would not have had anywhere near the commitment to career that I had as a childless person. Hopefully I would have felt that the privilege of parenting my kids was worth the cut in pay.
SKL | April 2nd, 2011 at 1:45 am
And as for women doing more housework/childcare - maybe we like it that way. I didn’t like the way the article made this sound like a problem.
And also, I didn’t like the way they said (paraphrasing) “we need to convince girls to like math better” and the like. Maybe the average woman would rather earn a modest wage than pursue a math/science-oriented career. That’s one of the things I like about the USA - you don’t have to choose from a few “acceptable” careers and squeeze into a mold you really don’t fit. The vast majority of working women are living above poverty level, per the statistics in the study. Should it be government policy to push them to achieve higher paychecks (at what expense)? I’m thinking not.
Rather than focus on making the overall average women’s pay equal to men’s, I’d prefer to see a focus on why single working moms have such a high incidence of poverty, and what can be done about that. I’m thinking it has little to do with whether or not they like Physics or Geometry.
SKL | April 2nd, 2011 at 3:51 am
This really is the main one: “Women are still carrying the burden of family,” Jarret pointed out. “Women aren’t able to spend as much time as work [as men] because they have all these other commitments and responsibilities. ”
True gender discrimination is when VP of marketing 1 does the same thing as VP marketing 2 but makes less because she is female or he is black or…but even then, very hard to prove. Because it could be the factors of where they live, or the choice to compensate both the education and the work e.g. vp 2 has an mba but vp 1 does not.
There is also negotiation there. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. There have been many studies on how men are not only more successful in negotiating salary but are more willing to start the conversation in the first place.
And I’d be one of those who doesn’t like to talk money. The scariest day of my life was telling my boss I needed a different job because the desk (where the big $ are made) needed someone who’d work any hours from 5am-9pm as needed at the drop of a hat. And that wasn’t me.
Mich | April 6th, 2011 at 4:08 pm