Moms On Issues
with Sara and Veronica
We're two moms with different backgrounds, jobs and points of view, writing about our opinions on the political and social issues affecting working moms. We'll also keep our eye on the media and the celebrity mom world to highlight issues that are relevant to your life.
Check out our personal blogs: Veronica's Blog and Sara's Blog
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.
Now I’m not sure how the rate per woman was calculated, but I’m bothered that a woman, who probably made six figures in her former corporate life, now a full-time mother, could possibly be satisfied with such a meager consulting fee. I can’t totally fault corporate America for being happy with the cost of the labor - companies have budgets and have to figure out how to stick to them. And there is little doubt that it is hard, as the brilliant Mir pointed out, in the freelancing world, to figure out how much to charge and to not just “settle” for a good gig that doesn’t pay enough. But isn’t this assumed consulting fee setting the bar a little low?
I know it’s not “always about the money.” Trust me, I have done numerous projects because I feel they are worth my time, even if I only make pennies per hour. But the projects that I may dedicate my time to aren’t for large organizations, like UNC. What UNC paid per hour for these women was a mere 8 percent of what I would have charged a client at my old job. I can’t imagine that my stock has gone down that much in the 5 months since I left the working world. In fact, I can’t think of another instance where it would be acceptable to charge 90 percent less for my services.
With these low standards we accept for ourselves, how will we ever achieve “fair pay?”
I’m not saying that I think a project I work on should be billed at a rate of a consultant at a top firm. I understand that I’ll have to take some paycuts along the way of stay-at-home motherhood. But $21 per hour? I’d rather sit on the couch all day and “say map! say map!”
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Does it have something to do with the fact that these moms were working part-time in academia? Or shouldn’t that have anything to do with it?
I left PR to stay at home, and unfortunately, I made that choice too soon (by workplace standards). I don’t have the experience to justify these types of short-term assignments, even AT a lower pay grade. So I suppose I represent those of us without master’s degrees or doctorates, who are left without even these options.
B. | May 8th, 2008 at 7:58 am
As a former 6-figure, now SAHM, I get what you are saying. It certainly doesn’t sound like $21 an hour is much. And what makes it more offensive is that they are referred to as cheap labor. Perhaps it would have been better to add that, in addition to keeping up with trends and having challenges, they had the opportunity to teach at an incredibly respected business school. That may be a resume booster that is difficult to quantify.
My husband is an adjunct professor teaching one class a semester at the university with the highest tuition in the nation. He makes 1/20 of a full professor’s salary (who is only required to teach 2 classes a semester). That, coupled with his PhD and his JD will hopefully get him a sweet teaching job when he leaves the regular market. Or not. It’s a gamble he’s taking for incredibly low pay.
Kristen | May 8th, 2008 at 10:08 am
Thanks for writing this! I have two master’s degrees and work one day a week outside the home now to be with my kids. On the others days I’m trying to build a freelance writing business. One of my male clients actually said to me “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you have a brain in your head.” Uh! I’m insulted you’re surprised by that!!! That said, he totally low balled me and it took a lot of negotiating to get a moderate increase. Even still is was a significant pay cut I took because we need the money. Ugh.
Shannon | May 8th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Sara, this is a good reminder to moms to not undervalue their services. Moms who do take on these part time projects should figure out how much their services are worth and stick to that figure. $21/hour really is low, but can’t really blame Corporate America for paying it if that’s what moms are willing to take. Right now we’re paying a SAHM who used to work for us WAY more than that to do a freelance project for us (same line of work you used to do — internal communications). But she set her rate…not us.
Amy@UWM | May 8th, 2008 at 7:54 pm
Its a nice blog to visit and more people wanting to work from home so they can spend more time with their families, companies are starting to understand the value of hiring off-site employees.
play | May 9th, 2008 at 6:39 am
I thought the same thing when I read that article (before seeing your post)! $21/hour doesn’t justify the childcare costs, time away from your family, transportation, tax filing implications. Don’t even get me started on calling them “cheap labor!”
Dem Mom | May 9th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Shannon! Don’t settle! Do a great job and then renegotiate. The more I think about it and talk to friends, the more fired up I get about the inequalities.
Sara | May 9th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Amen. This smacks to me like just another way for big business to avoid even thinking about becoming more family friendly. I’m blogging about this on BabyCenter. Kim M. alerted me to this post and I will be linking. Thanks.
Betsyb | May 10th, 2008 at 6:24 am
[...] over at Work it Mom thinks so. But Amy, of Mojomom, who happened to be part of one of these SWAT teams, has a different [...]
BabyCenter: MOMformation » Blog Archive » Mommy SWAT teams:opportunity or oppression? | May 10th, 2008 at 8:03 am
[...] on the WorkIt, Mom! blog, there’s a thought provoking post referencing a recent Wall Street Journal article that [...]
CareerSolvers » Blog Archive » Homeshoring for Moms…The Next Wave in Cheap Labor? | May 11th, 2008 at 11:23 am
I’m flabbergasted that you’d even entertain such low pay to begin with. May I make a suggestion? Using a formula that the Commonwealth of Va. has used for its former executive employees that it laid off and then rehired, take your past salary and break it down/hr. Just the salary, not the benifits such as vacation, health insurance, etc. Now, to your base salary/hr, add 10-15% and THAT is what you charge them per hour. In reality, they’re getting a bargin cause they’re not the ones footing the bill for the benifits, you are. As long as women themselves let others take advantage, we will ALWAYS be lowballed because we’ve allowed it.
Jane | May 11th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
I fear that the promise of telecommuting seems to be biting us in the ass by lowering wages. I see it in journalism…why pay a professional big bucks when someone will do it for 1/2 price or for free? It all adds up.
Veronica | May 11th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
[...] this: I still am hesitant about becoming a SWAT, but the conversation continues. Check out the dialogue here on BabyCenter and from a SWAT [...]
Monday afternoon link-love » Self-Made Mom | May 12th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
I read the article when it first came out and I was really offended by the fact that a top-rate business school would pay only $21 an hour. That is really peanuts. Honestly $21 an hour seems like such a small amount for women with those credentials.
I’m an IT consultant - now that I’ve had a baby I work only a few hours a day from home so that I can be with my daughter and not put her in daycare. I actually upped the rates I charge my clients when I decided to downsize the business. Not a single client balked at my new rates. I now work about 1/3 of what I used to but I make 70% of the money that I used to.
Rachael | May 14th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Hi Everyone — Mojo Mom here, one of the SWAT Moms who has been writing about my experience. I really appreciate this discussion and yes, money is important. I was pleased to participate in the UNC project, even at a modest hourly rate, because I saw it as a training/networking opportunity. I learned a lot doing the managerial simulations. This was a short-term project, just a couple of weeks, so no one was depending on it to pay their bills. I can understand why the ‘cheap labor’ angle of the WSJ article was not appreciated. I want to make it clear that UNC itself treated us very respectfully, and other similar work at the business school had been done on a volunteer basis in the past. So for this pilot project to pay $21/hour including our time receiving worthwhile training seemed like a reasonable deal.
It’s important to look at the entire set of benefits that can come from an experience. In the final analysis, the connections I made on this brief assignment actually ended up paying off in a big way. I will share more details next week on my Mojo Mom blog if you are interested.
Amy Tiemann | May 30th, 2008 at 9:28 am
Amy, I’m glad you responded here. I look forward to reading more details of your experience. In theory, I agree with your assessment of participating in work not just for money, but also for benefits that don’t have a price attached. I just wanted to have the discussion so that we as SAHM don’t discount ourselves too much in work that doesn’t pay off in other ways. We will all continue to learn from each other’s experiences.
Sara | June 3rd, 2008 at 9:42 pm
The fact is, if you take time out of the workforce, when you return you will be earning less money. It is not gender discrimination. A man would face the same problem if he were to try and re-enter the workforce after 10 years of not working.
Don’t whine about $21 an hour. You would definitely NOT be making this working at Costco. You’d be earning $7.00 an hour if you were lucky.
It is arrogant for any person to think they can stay out of the workforce for years, then walk into a high salaried corporate job with lots of benefits and perks. That is a fairy tale, it is not reality.
Cory | July 2nd, 2008 at 8:14 pm