I recently welcomed to this world my 2nd equally best achievement in life, my daughter Selene. She is already 5 days old & as i am writing this post she is hitting her first nutrition & baby reflex milestones. She is also my inspiration for the post that follows.
And is not going to be a pleasant one to share this time.
Today's post is not about business or life hacks . More than anything is about addressing the elephant in the room, the real reason that women's salaries are penalized by the western social structure for being mothers. The saddest thing (and I'm truly annoyed with my own self about this) is that it took me 2 children & 3 years to realize it.
I'm not a sociologist or a salary equality expert. My post is not aiming to provide advise or guidance. Yes, i have done the exercise & read the charts, but clever PPTs & XLs do not tell you the real story. Definitely not the one i have seen with my own eyes.
Here is the thing: Thinking retrospectively about my wife's career, i could genuinely say that she is very well appreciated in her job role, getting well (& equally) paid for her role responsibilities & the size of the company that she is a part of. Her carrier has being going from good to great until she went on her 1st Maternity leave. And this is where it all starts going downhill:
A) Maternity leave compensation is a joke:
As a start, it is important to mention that while a man's salary is not effected at all from a child's birth, a woman's salary is crippled. We are talking about monthly peanuts of 600£ (way below the national basic wage) that are supposed to fulfill the family's lifestyle added a new family member. Basically women, are punished for being mothers by a salary cut, because the government has not done enough to secure mothers' basic human decency.
B) Our entire social structure is based on outdated patriarchy:
Me & my wife equally want to spend time with the new born but society structure does not allow us to. It is well known that paternity leave is a 2 weeks allowance compensated with 300£/week(!). Dads basically have no access to the social reward of being a father and are forced to work, leaving the childcare almost exclusively to the mothers. It is only a blessing that my leave is fully paid due to my company's decision.
In the UK, we have the most expensive childcare as a proportion of a mother's earnings in the OECD. A 2020 research with 27,000 parents found that two-thirds pay the same or more for their childcare as they do on rent or their mortgage. And that results in one in four families saying they're either skipping meals or foregoing heating and fuel in order to pay for childcare. But it's also really inaccessible because the government isn't funding it properly. So nurseries are closing their doors. In UK, one in five parents say that their local childcare provider has closed in the past 12 months. And 41% of parents said there is at least a six-month waiting list at the local childcare provider. So basically our childcare is very expensive & inaccessible.
Parents (=correction), MOTHERS cannot work without childcare, it's social infrastructure. We have 870,000 stay-at-home mothers in the UK who want to work but can't purely because of the cost of childcare. It’s so good for the economy, it contributes billions and billions of pounds, if we can give women the tools that they need to be able to work. And we know that pretty much all mothers want to work, they just in many cases, can't afford to. As a result they are forced to stay out of work longer, staying behind in the ladder of carrier, professional & yes, salary development.
Women do almost three times the care work of men, they do 60% more of the unpaid labor and that's obviously devastating for their careers. Many of them are working full-time, more than three-quarters of mothers work. So you have a situation where they're going to work, doing all of this paid work, and then coming back and doing unpaid work as well. Many women request to work flexibly, and part-time. And that means they get lower pay, it means they're half as likely to be promoted than if they're working full-time. So it all interlinks - all of the domestic labor they're doing is a big part of the motherhood punishment.
Basically women are disproportionally pushed out from high salaries when they choose to become mothers due our dysfunctional care system. They are forced to stay out of work longer - therefor fall behind on their salaries - or even get boxed in part time jobs in order to juggle the rising cost of living vs. raising their child.
In conclusion, the way i see it, is that we need to stop talking about the "trendy topic" of Salary Gender Gap & how companies can address it. Instead we need to start talking about the mythical unicorn that mothers have a choice between financial & mental survival or a career. In reality women's choices are predefined by a crippled social care system that doesn't care...
As a closure i would strongly advise all of you (men & women, mothers & dads) to read the exceptional book of Joeli Brearley: The Motherhood penalty: How to stop motherhood being the kiss of death for your career. It is an extraordinary well thought piece of work that touched me deeply and inspired me.
This post is for all the mothers out there that give the good fight.
