This article in the Wall Street Journal my friend Kim sent me caught my eye mainly because of its title, “How Stay-at-Home Moms Are Filling an Executive Niche.” Now that my working mom status has changed, I pay close attention to how the media covers stay-at-home moms. Especially when the topic has anything to do with stay-at-home moms re-entering the workforce. In this particular article, the author, Sue Shellenbarger, focuses on a topic of particular interest to me - moms who take on small projects to stay up on current business trends.

Shellenbarger states:

The decision among some highly educated women to stay home with children is sparking a countertrend: The rise of the mommy “SWAT team.” The acronym, for “smart women with available time,” is one mother’s label for all-mom teams assembled quickly through networking and staffing firms to handle crash projects. Employers get lots of voltage, cheap, while the women get a skills update and a taste of the professional challenges they miss.

I get this concept. I too, feel that I’m a highly educated woman who likes to network and handle small, last-minute projects. I try to stay in the mix as often as possible so that I can mingle with adults from time-to-time and keep my mind fresh. I’m pretty sure in four years, an executive won’t care if I can recite the theme song to “Dora the Explorer.”

However, I’m bothered by one of the themes of the article overall - that highly educated stay-at-home moms can be bought for consulting work for “cheap” because the chance to get refreshed on current business trends and dip our toes in professional challenges makes up for the money.

Shellenbarger highlights the “cheap” cost of using SAHMs in corporate work:

The University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School was able to muster an “incredibly talented” team with eight at-home mothers — including a Stanford University Ph.D… The team taught leadership skills to 100 M.B.A. candidates…[and the] training was so successful that enrollment doubled this spring and Kenan-Flagler made it mandatory for leadership training. Cost to the B-school: $21 an hour per woman.

Twenty-one dollars per hour? And one of the women leading the training has her Ph.D? I might as well go get a job at Costco and work a few overtime shifts. I guess my master’s degree isn’t worth as much as I thought if I don’t keep it in practice.

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As I was watching Jennifer roll through the questions on Jeopardy! on Saturday, I thought I noticed a trait that I sometimes find myself doing - Not going for the kill. At one point, Jennifer had earned $10,000, the champion had $5,000 and the other guy had maybe $2,000. She hit the Daily Double and risked $2,000. Now that’s a fair amount to wager on a Daily Double when someone’s about four grand behind you, but within four more turns she had landed the second one and was up around $12,000 and the men were far behind her. That’s when I saw it. That nervous smile women get when they are rolling over the competition, especially men, and suddenly realize that “men don’t like losing to women.” Jennifer wagered $2,000 again and easily won it.

If you’re a fan of Jeopardy! you know that they were in the second round. They were early in the second round. Before I knew it, the returning champion was nipping at Jennifer’s heels. In fact the second round ended with Jennifer up only a few HUNDRED dollars. Yes, Mr. Champion had blazed through a few big dollar questions, but I couldn’t help wonder if Jennifer had eased up a bit.
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What is the media’s obsession these days on whether or not celebrity moms (or any mom for that reason), breastfeeds? Every time a new celebrity has a baby, we are inundated with too much information about their personal decision on how they decided to feed their babies.

Heck, the website BreastFeeding.com even has a page dedicated to “famous breastfeeding moms.” My question is, who cares?
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The basis for tome’s like Linda Hirshman‘s Get To Work and Lisa Bennett’s Feminine Mistake may appear to be nothing more than telling women what to do but if you can ignore the horrible presentation, the real issue is that Hirshman, Bennett and others are seriously tired of seeing women make up the majority of those living in poverty. Not just making up a large percentage, but that women end up there because we take time out of work to care for our family members.

* Women comprise 56% of Americans over 18 who live in poverty. [cite]
* In 2004, 28.4 percent of households headed by single women were poor. [cite]
* Nearly two-thirds of white women who are poor in old age have not been poor in the earlier years. This demonstrates an increased risk or a newly emerging risk of poverty for many white women. [cite]
* Old age poverty for African-American women reflects economic disadvantages in their earlier years compared with white women. [cite]
* In the United States, the share of elderly women living in poverty is highest among divorced or separated women (37 percent), followed by widowed women (28 percent), never-married women (22 percent), and married women (10 percent). [cite]

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The controversy surrounding Rob Lowe and his nanny’s allegations that he abused her during her employment with his family raises eyebrows not only for the lewd allegations coming from both sides, but also for the complicated dynamics of employing caretakers in your household.

Allowing what amounts is a perfect stranger come into your home, take care of your kids is a daunting thought. Having a nanny or babysitter in your house for extended periods of time can certainly be awkward, even if your nanny is like Mary Poppins. I cannot think of another situation where an employee comes to work only to find her boss dressed in pajamas without any makeup. (If you work in such a place, don’t tell me; I’ll be jealous).

Letting someone else take care of your children, only if for defined periods of time, takes a measure of intestinal fortitude. Who else is going to see how much you spent at Target in one day?

Certainly not your husband. But the nanny knows all. I try not to get too personal with my sitter. If I’m all decked out in workout clothes and she asks if I’m going to the gym, I simply skirt the issue. It’s none of her business how I spend my time when she’s with my son. (However, I’m sure the wet nail polish when I arrive home at the end of the day is a dead giveaway.) There are boundaries to any employee/ employer relationship, and the nanny-mother/father one is no exception.

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Friday was Fair Pay Day, marking the day when women have finally earned enough money to equal how much money a man earned all of 2007. Yes, according to those who study the wage gap, the 23 cents women, on average, aren’t making compared to an average man, it takes us until April 18th to make up.

Of course the wage gap isn’t as cut and dry as just a mere 24 cents. Considering that most of the world is set up by a white male standard (don’t even pretend it isn’t, folks), let’s look at the wage gap for different women:

• African-American woman - 63 cents
• Latina woman - 52 cents

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There are times when I wonder if I’m doing this whole mom thing right. But then I stop to think and subsequently give myself a good bitch-slap. There is no “right” way to parent, right?

A recent MSNBC article got me thinking about this topic. As the story states,

In the aftermath of the high-profile arrest of the Illinois mom who left her napping toddler in a car parked outside a Wal-Mart while she donated change out front (charges were later dropped), parents are left wondering whether their own small misdeeds could land them a nasty scolding from a meddling busybody — or even a charge of neglectful parenting by the authorities.

Since I became a mother, I have created certain lifestyle choices that I try to obey. But what holds me together as a mom of a toddler is my own personal mantra: there are absolutely no rules to parenting. No matter what the busybodies and even the experts think.

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I am not shy when it comes to stating that I am an ambitious woman. My goal is to be the executive director of a non-profit organization that works on behalf of girls and/or women. I also would love to have my own op-ed column syndicated in newspapers…or whatever people are reading in the future. In order to do those two kinda related things, I work my butt off on learning how to run an organization and on my writing. This also means that I put in an eight-hour work day and then put in another 2-3 hours at home on my other activities (mostly writing and reading). I also know that I married an equally ambitious man. Luckily his current job is far more 9-5 than mine and his extracurricular activities are not as numerous as mine (he is much better at saying no than I am).

When we graduated from college we decided that whomever found a job first, that’s what we would do. My husband won and we stayed in Chicago. Since then we’ve both made enough friends and contacts that Chicago, where we were born & raised, has become OUR home. Yet I know that as we progress in our careers a job in another state might land in my lap or a more high powered position will come knocking on his door. If I were to take a job that moved us to Seattle, I think many people would applaud my husband for being the “trailing” partner aka the partner who moves for the benefit of the other partner. But would they do the same for me if he was offered an amazing job that required me to pull back from work, community work, or heck, even quit my job? Given the reaction that Michelle Obama received when she resigned from her high powered job to campaign for her husband, I highly doubt it.
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I have a confession - I was a finalist for the 2006 Swiffer Amazing Woman of the Year. The call went out for nominations and many thought it was stereotypical for a cleaning product to name amazing women. Of course I went directly to the fine print and rules. No where did it say that the amazing woman had to keep a clean house. This was important because I’m a lucky gal in that my husband is the one who keeps us from living in a pit of dirty dishes and laundry. If we were to tally up the hours each of us spends on chores I believe it would be at least a 60/40 split (some weeks far more towards the 80/20 end) with my husband on the losing end. I know we’re a rare pair, but among our hetero-couple friends, it’s fairly common for them to be engaged in an egalitarian relationship when it comes to chores and raising the kids. Obviously I didn’t win and it was pretty embarrassing asking co-workers to vote for me on the internet for a chance to spend the summer promoting Swiffers. But I really did want to promote the idea of egalitarian relationships - Maybe that doomed me, eh? I also wanted the cash prize $5,000 for a nonprofit of my choice.

Whether you work in a cubicle downtown or in your fuzzy slippers during nap time, all working moms have to manage housework on top of our paid work. According to a new study by lead researcher Frank Stafford, an economist at University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, when women get married, the amount of housework we do goes up. It goes up again once we have kids (that’s a no brainer, eh?).
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I’ve been keeping tabs on a new trend deemed to make the lives of working parents easier: some companies are providing parents the ability and opportunity to bring their babies to work. According to USA Today,

More than 80 companies across the nation allow babies in the workplace, according to Parenting in the Workplace Institute in Framingham, Mass., which says that number is likely to be low.

I know our country is seriously lacking in the flexible and affordable child care department, but I’m not sure bringing your baby to work is the answer to our needs.

There are some serious pros to the argument, as a study reported byTime suggests.

But even naysayers may be surprised by the results of research conducted by Mary Secret, a social-work professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her 2005 analysis of 55 businesses with baby-friendly policies found that people often anticipate disaster but there is rarely a negative effect on co-workers or productivity. What’s more, she learned that having babies around can boost morale among colleagues.

Having a baby around may make people feel all warm in fuzzy inside, but does warm and fuzzy really get the work done?
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