Martha was away from her home, yet again traveling on a business trip. Seven months pregnant with her second child, she was sitting in the waiting area of a small Horizon Airlines terminal in the Portland airport when she suddenly got a creepy feeling. She just had to know what her two-year-old son, at home with their nanny, was doing at that very moment. Martha’s son, like 10 percent of all children in childcare, was cared for at home by a nanny or babysitter.34
While waiting for her airplane, “I had this really unsettling feeling, which wasn’t common for me,” recalls Martha. So she called her father who lived close to her home and asked him to drive by her house to see what was going on with her son and the nanny on “one of those surprise visits that you read about in parenting magazines.”
Her cell phone started ringing as Martha was walking across the tarmac to the rolling metal stairs that led into the airplane. It was her dad reporting back. After driving over to Martha’s house, he found her son playing in the caregiver’s parked car in the street while she was busy cleaning out her car. He wasn’t pleased with what he saw, and neither was Martha. Not a capital offense, but not exactly what Martha imagined as ideal for her son’s upbringing.
She made a huge decision right then about her next life steps as she talked on her cell phone while hovering under the airplane wing. The wind was whipping her hair into a tangled mess. “I felt like, ‘That’s it. I’m doing all this work to pay for my kid to play in a parked car in the street.’ I felt like there were so many better things for him to be doing. So that’s when I decided I needed to be more involved.”
She explains that her problem wasn’t so much about the caregiver, and notes that a lot of people wouldn’t have a problem with what the caregiver was doing, but it was more that, “I wanted to be making those choices,” she says, about what her son was doing each day.
So Martha quit her position as a vice president of a Fortune 500 company and decided to stay home for several years with her two children. Martha is one of many parents who are “sequencing,” moving in and out of the workplace to care for children.
For the first time in twenty-five years, a growing number of women are taking time out of the workforce when they have infants (babies under a year old). In fact, the proportion of mothers of infants in the workforce declined from a record high of 59 percent in 1998, to a lower 55 percent in 2000. This was the first significant decline since the U.S. Census Bureau began publishing this statistic in 1976.35 The decline continued in 2002, when 54.6 percent of mothers with infants were in the workforce.36
That said, 72 percent of all mothers with children over one year old were in the labor force.37 What does this mean? It means that more women are leaving their jobs to stay home with babies for the first year of their child’s life, but that women aren’t opting out of work completely; they are going back to work when their children are older.
Having babies is a happy reality of life, and many parents savor the time spent away from work caring for a new baby. The problem with parents quitting their jobs to stay home with a newborn is that mothers, and families, suffer long-lasting financial consequences when they leave the workforce. Yet, without flexible work options, and without long-term paid family leave, quitting their jobs is the best option many parents have available to them. Ideally, work structures should be set up to allow parents to work around the ebb and flow of family needs and to also enjoy time with their children. But right now they’re not.
Because of this, many new mothers don’t have a real “choice” about whether or not to quit their jobs. If they didn’t have a high paying job to start or access to paid family leave, many women find the cost of infant childcare would eat their entire paycheck. For these mothers, taking time out of the workforce, or sequencing, may be the most practical option, particularly if a relative or some other person isn’t available to watch their infant for free while they work.
For many women, being a full-time parent isn’t an option because their paycheck is needed to support the family; and many families with a full-time parent at home are struggling. One clear indication of this is that families with a stay-at-home parent are seven times more likely to live in poverty than those with two working parents.38 In fact, the birth of a child is too often a time of extreme financial challenge for American families, with a quarter of “poverty spells” starting with the birth of a baby.39
Those wage hits, it turns out, persist for decades after returning to the workforce. The biggest decline in wages is seen during the first year back to work; though the wage gap does narrow the longer women are back in the workplace, more than two decades later these women still make far less than their counterparts who kept working without breaks.40 One notable study published in the Monthly Labor Review, reports, “Women whose gaps [time out of the workplace] ended less than one year ago had wages that were 33 percent lower than those of women who did not leave the labor force. By the third year (when they would have returned to the work force more than three years ago) these women’s wages were only 20 percent lower than those of women who remained in the labor force.”41
Contrary to the authors of the study, we think “only” 20 percent lower wages after three years back in the labor force is an eye-catching and depressing statistic for all women. What’s more, the gap never completely disappears, regardless of the time back at work. The report continues, “Even women whose labor force gap occurred more than twenty years ago still earn between 5 and 7 percent less than women who never left the labor force and have comparable levels of experience.”42
One of the biggest long-term costs of sequencing is women’s increased risk for having inadequate retirement income. Our retirement system is based on earnings, so full-time parents don’t accrue social security or other retirement benefits during their time at home. Retirement benefits also rarely transfer from job to job. In fact, women account for a disproportionate, and growing, percentage of the elderly poor. In 1983 women made up 71 percent of seniors living below the poverty line; in 1995 it was 75 percent.
It’s clear that despite the short- and long-term economic hits, more women are moving in and out of the labor force after the birth of a child. Some are sequencing quite successfully.
A pioneer in successful sequencing, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright went back to paid work after fifteen years of juggling parenting and graduate school. She recalls an incident indicative of her life then. “I was working for U.S. Senator Muskie and my youngest daughter, Katie [then seven], called for me on the phone.” Katie was told, “ ‘I’m sorry, you can’t talk to your mom right now. She’s on the floor with Senator Muskie.’ ” Secretary Albright clearly relishes recounting the punch line, “When I got home my daughter said, ‘Mom, I know you have a new job, but what were you doing on the floor with Senator Muskie!?’ ” The floor, of course, was the voting area of the United States Senate. Not quite the picture her daughter had in mind.
Whether or not one agrees with Secretary Albright’s politics, there’s no question she’s a formidable woman. Secretary Albright served as the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations; as a member of President Clinton’s cabinet; as a staff member on the National Security Council; and most recently, was the first woman in the history of the U.S. government to achieve the high rank of U.S. secretary of state, fourth in line to the president.
She is also a former full-time mom who didn’t get started in her current professional career until she was thirty-nine.
“People find it hard to believe that I was home with my children. It wasn’t until I went into the Clinton administration that my chronological age and my professional age matched, because I had ‘taken time out,’ ” says Secretary Albright, discussing the time spent with her children.45
Mothers like Secretary Albright show it’s possible to high jump over the “maternal wall.” But individual success stories don’t translate into widespread success for women. The maternal wall is holding strong. As this chapter reveals, studies show the majority of mothers suffer the long-term economic burdens of motherhood, which increase with employment breaks, for their entire lives.
One way many women deal with inflexible work environments when “sequencing” in and out of the workforce is to take working matters into their own hands. Many moms who quit work when they had children, later create their own flexible work arrangements when they sequence back into the workforce by starting their own businesses. In fact, women are starting businesses at more than double the rate of the general American public.46
Martha, the mother under the airplane wing, is one such woman. After six years out of the labor force, she started her own public relations firm, noting, “I knew that when I went back to work it was going to have to wrap around my life and my family’s life. I really want to see my kids when they are young, so I knew I was going to have to create my own work environment because I didn’t see that possibility with my old employer—not to slam them, but it’s a current reality of a very large workplace. They have their business and they want to run it their way, but that doesn’t mean I have to run my business their way. I’m happy running mine my way—and I’m quite successful too.”
The reality is that a number of factors are going to have to come together to lessen the penalties on moms who take time out from paid work to care for children. First, the underlying causes that force some women to quit their jobs in order to stay home with infants need to be addressed. Providing support to new parents, as most other countries do, in the form of realistic paid family leave is a good start (the average industrial country guarantees significantly more weeks of leave than the U.S. does).47 Second, allowing women (and men) flexible work options that let work wrap around family needs will go a long way toward helping parents, and businesses, in America succeed.