This is a replay of a post authored by Vickie Pynchon on ForbesWoman, Wednesday, February 9, 2012.
As if the gender wage gap weren’t bad enough, we’re now told that mothers – that’s America, moms and apple pie y’all – make 7 to 14% less than the childless among us.
Here’s NPR this morning on the mom-gap.
BAKST: Well, there’s still blatant discrimination against new mothers out there. I mean you would be shocked what we hear when pregnant women announce their pregnancies and are told or what are we going to do about that? I mean that is still out there alive and well. But, of course, there’s much more subtle stereotyping about new mother’s competence and commitment that’s going on in the workplace. You know, we often see women returning from maternity leave who are given less work or dead end assignments. And this type of discrimination really drags down wages for women because they get off track, and even worse off and pushed out of the workforce.
And then we also hear about women who work part-time who really face a documented wage and benefit penalty. The penalties associated with part-time work in the U.S. are actually seven times higher as they are in Sweden and the UK, and this affects workers across the economic spectrum, but we see low-wage workers especially hard hit with little if no benefits and with pretty much no with documented wage penalties.
Here’s the first remedy for the mom wage gap. Mom Corps will get you back into the working world after you’ve fallen out for having committed the career-crime of having children. Here’s what Mom Corps Dallas has to say about itself:
for progressive companies seeking an engaged, flexible workforce, Mom Corps Dallas is the trusted provider of highly skilled, professional candidates allowing you to meet business needs and cycles of today. Our clients have the competitive advantage of operating more efficiently by paying for professionals as needed. In turn, we provide job candidates with challenging, flexible opportunities so that they can continue in their careers while striving for their key objective: work life balance.
And if you think “flexible” means making less money, see what my business partner, Lisa Gates has to say about that.
“Asking” Training and Consulting
I have a client who’s one of those high potential women you hear about. Already rocking the working world in heady six figures. We just negotiated a raise and promotion for her that was north of 40%.
When we first spoke she told me she thought she’d just hire me for an hour, learn what she needed to know to accomplish her goals and then go do it. She’s a go-getter like that but she surely underestimated what it would take to reach those goals.
Vickie Pynchon, Esq., is an attorney-mediator and arbitrator. She is also a principal in the She Negotiates Consulting + Training firm for which her blog is named. She also writes for the Forbes.com legal blog On the Docket. Her book, A is for A**hole, the Grownups’ ABCs of Conflict Resolution, was released by Reason Press this October and is available on Amazon.com. Her book, Success as a Mediator for Dummies, will be released in April 2012 and is available for pre-order on BarnesandNoble.com.
You can follow her on Twitter, like her on Facebook and connect with her on LinkedIn.
