a more nuanced conversation about working moms
and new child care centers for police?
last year after my motherhood dread essay was published I received an interesting note from a sociologist who said she felt like there was a similar body of research on the “motherhood penalty” that got less attention because it complicated the idea that having kids invariably hurts women in the workplace. I was intrigued, and asked her for some more examples, but then the holidays came and I got caught up with other projects. A few months ago though a new study came out I caught wind of that also raised questions about long-term evidence for motherhood penalties in the workplace.
With that I decided to start looking into the broader body of research, and have been having interesting conversations with scholars who approach the questions from different angles. Because it did become evident pretty quickly that it’s not entirely clear what social (and/or economic) problem we want to address when we’re talking about the motherhood penalty: is it that mothers earn less than fathers? less than men? less than childless women? is it that households take an overall income hit? getting more specific on that could lead to different policy solutions and cultural campaigns.
today I published that story on the motherhood penalty, and I think it gets at some important ideas, whether you’re coming at it from a reproductive justice lens, a gender equity lens, or a lens focused primarily on declining birth rates.
One takeaway I had is that women who wait until they’re older to have kids, done their schooling, done their job training and so on are typically making rational economic choices; motherhood penalties for those women do tend to be much less severe, if present at all. But also societies have tools to change those individual calculations and tradeoffs, if they want to make it easier for women to have kids at earlier ages. Many women will continue to wait for a variety of reasons, but I know from my time reporting on child care that some certainly wished they could start earlier, but felt it just didn’t make economic sense for them. Career trajectories and child-bearing years just aren’t well aligned at present.
The piece looks at theories on the motherhood penalty, future questions for research, and policy measures that help working parents thrive. I really do think we all deserve a better conversation around this.
I also published a piece last week on a new policy trend of special subsidized child care centers for parents in law enforcement. It’s a (somewhat controversial) trend that is not disconnected from the public relations hit cops have taken over the last decade, and the industry’s sense that they’re having a harder time recruiting new police, and keeping ones they hire on staff. It’s a push that’s being discussed in terms of improving public safety and supporting working mothers and diversifying gender in law enforcement, but also one that’s in the hopes of giving the profession a bit of an overall PR boost after a decade-long focus on police brutality.
maybe we'll decide one day that creating special benefits for politically popular jobs is not a great way to structure society, but until then we'll probably continue to see things like subsidized teacher housing and subsidized child care for law enforcement. The piece also looks at some questions around employer-centric child care generally, and that’s a topic I definitely hope to return to at greater length in the next year.
thanks so much for reading! Have some good pieces in the works for the rest of the month I’m going to go work on finishing, and I hope wherever you are is less hot than Washington DC has been.
Thanks so much for writing back, Rachel! :) This is such a pertinent question, and we've been asking this ourselves - based on my understanding, I definitely don't think that women who engage in the informal sector (by way of their socio-economic class) have the luxury of thinking of a motherhood penalty as something that just stagnates their career progression or creates a wage gap. It often has life and death implications, such as a loss of livelihood or going into debt. Perhaps formalisation could add the layer of career aspirations as well, provided basic needs are met? 🤷🏾♀️ At any rate, in India the government does provide creche services (called "anganwadi" services), as do civil society and NGOs like SEWA, Chintan, Sampark and Mobile Creches. But given our population, this is a drop in the bucket. There's so much more to be done, and IMO unpaid work alleviation needs to be part of a larger social safety net made available to these women.
Hello from another corner of the globe! :) Absolutely love reading your newsletters, and this one particularly resonated with me since I work on gender in India and unpaid work, primarily that which is gender segregated, and its impact on women's access to economic opportunities is a particular interest area of mine. I absolutely agree with you that these are conversations everyone should ideally be having, but a trend I have seen in my own country is that so many of these questions are asked only of women working in the formal sector. With most Indian women being in the informal sector, they don't even have the luxury of seeing if they are indeed paying a motherhood penalty at all. Subsidising child care is important for all (I don't want to reduce it to just women even if they bear the brunt of it, but hopefully not always), but makes most sense to this bracket if that helps formalise their jobs at all. Apologies for this rambling message but honestly I always get excited to see research in this area! :)