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September 10, 2007
My Top 10 Wishes for Working Parents
Sunday is Working Parents Day, and it’s got me thinking: What would be my top ten wishes for working parent support? Below is my list, in no particular order of priority. Feel free to add to it as you deem fit.
· An End to the “Should She or Shouldn’t She?” Working Mother Debate: Moms seek employment for the same reasons everyone else does. We need to stop wasting our energy on whether they “should” work and start focusing on how we can support men and women who have dependent care.
· Supportive Bosses: Research suggests that a supportive boss can make or break your job. In my own research of some 200-plus women for my book, The Mom Economy, a supportive boss was the only common denominator among every woman who said she had very or extremely family-friendly work.
· Paid Maternity/Paternity Leave: After adopting or giving birth to a child, every parent should be able to take leave. If that leave is not paid, some cannot. Men should get paid paternity leave too.
· Greater Use of Alternative Work Arrangements Without Penalty: As Sylvia Ann Hewlett points out in her book Off-Ramps and On-Ramps, we need to rethink paths of advancement. Careers tend to take off during the child-rearing years, when women tend to scale back. Retirement is occurring later, job tenures are shorter, and alternative work arrangements like telecommuting and flexible schedules are becoming more common. We need to be able to pursue these options and still advance.
· A New School Calendar: Three-month summers and short school days worked fine when Mom stayed home. Now, for working parents, summer vacations and after-school care is a scramble at best. Once more, the length of the summer holiday means children often regress. Everyone -- children and adults alike -- would benefit from a new school calendar year. Teachers would have to be paid more, but that too is long overdue.
· A Supportive Spouse: It’s much easier to be a working parent when the other parent is involved, both emotionally and physically. This involvement includes sharing household chores and childcare responsibilities.
· A Support Network: I have a great neighbor. When I’m stuck, she helps me out. When she’s stuck, I try to do the same. I wish that for everyone.
· On-Site Childcare or Childcare Assistance That Includes School-Age Care: On-site school-age care? Now, that’s a novel concept. I don’t know how to do it, but can’t it be done? And while employers are providing some form of childcare assistance, can they please make a place for breast-feeding moms?
· College Savings Plans: With the cost of college rising, saving for our kids’ college is not only important, but growing more difficult. Note to employers: Openly offer plans, promote them and make them as available as a retirement plan -- complete with a company match.
· Universal Healthcare Coverage: No one should go without healthcare, especially kids.
For related information, check out these additional Monster resources:
From the Monster Blog:
· “Working Mothers: Stop Feeling Guilty”
· “‘Hurray for Snow Days?’ Asks This Working Mom”
· “A Good Guide for Working Fathers: Daddy Blogs”
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Posted by Elizabeth on September 10, 2007 at 01:22 PM in Women at Work | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)
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Comments
we really need to knock off the distinction between a working mother and a woman with no kids - I hate the inference that a woman with kids is somehow entitled to special treatment because of little janey or johnny - sorry but this has gone too far. You wanna have kids and work - fine, great - but do it on your own time and deal with it and leave my job and duties out of it
Posted by: sue | Sep 11, 2007 4:07:33 PM
Knowing it is a wish list, let me say right off you’re entitled to wish for it. But I believe most of these will have a greater negative impact than positive.
I know; it’s very easy for some women to say I am a male, so what do I know about a working woman? Plenty, but then, what do they know about being a working man?
Several of these ideas are fine, in and of themselves. Supportive Bosses, for example, is something that can’t be mandated, so it is something that can and will evolve in a competitive environment. If Company A sees the best people work for Company B, and Company B has what you term Supportive Bosses, the natural tendency will be for Co. A to find something comparative, either in the Bosses themselves or other compensation.
On the subject of Paternity Leave: we have FMLA already for both parents. And a certain amount of Maternity Leave is paid already (and insurance covers additional time). Exactly where do you propose companies come up with the funding for even more paid leave? And if men really wanted paid Paternity Leave, wouldn’t they lobby for it themselves? This is another fringe benefit, and like health insurance coverage, will be provided by businesses in response to demand, but only if it is economically feasible.
Regarding the School Calendar, how can you justify your request for those kids whose mom stays at home? While more and more homes have dual incomes (with kids), have we yet reached the point where the majority do this? What about extra-curricula activites and sports? What of older kids and their opportunities for part time jobs, especially during the summer months? If the school day runs longer, where do these and other activities fit in? And if you propose a longer school day and longer school year, when can families take vacation if everyone has less than three months to work with for scheduling? (I am not even discussing what this proposal would do for the revenues of businesses that thrive/survive on tourist trade).
A Support Network is great, as you point out, and my family relies/assists in one also. But based on the inclination to create more and more opportunities for dual-income families, what will become of the neighbors, once they go to work, too?
On-site child care? I think it is great that some companies offer it, but to ask for all companies to do so is a hard sell. You want to provide the ability for parents to leave kids of various ages, on-site (or even near-by), that can expand or contract to the needs of the individual company. What happens if too many workers have too few kids of the appropriate age (or choose to use grandparents, etc. instead of the company daycare): what to do with those underused resources? How can a company plan for an unexpected rise in the number of kids needing the daycare?
Universal Healthcare Coverage is something that has been tried, repeatedly, and fails miserably. To the extent that many people in the countries that offer UHC will travel to the US for their healthcare should be evidence, enough, of what a bad idea this is.
Posted by: Charlie on the PA Turnpike | Sep 12, 2007 7:41:57 AM
Great list.
To "Paid Maternity/Paternity Leave," I would add "without penalty" just as you did for alternative work arrangements. We study Family Responsibilities Discrimination (employment discrimination against people who care for family members, such as mothers & fathers of young children, men and women with aging parents, pregnant women), and we run a hotline for employees who want to discuss whether they may be facing FRD. We hear a lot of stories of men who want to take time off to be with their newborns and to care for their recovering wives, but they are discouraged from doing so. Sometimes the discouragement is open and obvious (such as a supervisor saying the man can't have the time off (yes, that really happens!) or that the man's wife can take care of the newborn and the workplace needs the man to be working), and sometimes it is indirect (a man will be punished for taking time off through impossible workloads or undesirable schedules, or denied promotions or be shunned, and then that will become part of the workplace lore ("don't take time off or you could end up like poor Paul!")). Increasingly, men who are facing these types of penalties are suing their employers for discrimination.
A note to Charlie: While you can't mandate supportive bosses, there is something companies can do to correct situations in which supervisors are not being supportive -- and companies have a lot of incentives to do that because unsupportive bosses lead to increased and costly attriton and expose the company to potential FRD lawsuits. Unsupportive bosses usually are operating with some unexamined biases, and very simple training can bring the biases to light and greatly reduce their impact. Much of the overt sexism is now gone from our workplaces (like "help wanted - female" ads and women being denied entry into certain occupations because of their sex). But the covert or unexamined bias about how men and women behave or should behave in the workplace still leads a robust existence, and studies show that this bias affects how women and men are perceived, evaluated, rewarded, and promoted. Some of this bias leads to the glass ceiling effect, and some of it leads to the maternal wall effect -- discrimination against women because they are mothers. For example, a supervisor may assume that once a woman becomes a mother, she won't be as committed to her job. Without giving her a chance to prove otherwise (and without thinking about whether the company would be better off retaining her because even with 80% of her attention focused on work, she is still an excellent employee), the supervisor may start giving her less desirable assignments, not considering her for promotions, or even act with hostility toward her in an attempt to make her quit. The supervisor may not realize that he or she has this assumption about mothers, and once the supervisor is made aware of the bias and thinks through how he or she is treating the mother differently from other employees and whether the company would be better off retaining the mother, the supervisor's actions may well be very different.
There are many assumptions like the one above that we at WorkLife Law commonly see in the workplace. Some are benevolent, like a new mother won't want to travel or work long hours (nice thought, but it may well have the effect of putting the mother on a dead-end track; the solution is to talk it through with the mother and see what she wants rather than making an assumption for her), and some impose on women the supervisor's own values (like supervisors who decide that women should stay home with their babies and therefore fire them after they give birth), and some are hostile (like supervisors who don't want any mothers working for them and try to make them quit). And assumptions affect men, too, such as the assumption that men who take time off to be with their families aren't team players, can't be counted on, and aren't ambitious.
Companies are realizing that they strengthen their workforces when they educate supervisors about biases and common workplace situations in which they arise. It took a long time to educate supervisors about sexual harassment (not to suggest that the job is done now, of course), and it will take a long time to educate supervisors about FRD. But with some hard work, it just may lead to the granting of many of the items on the wish list for working parents.
Posted by: Cynthia from WorkLife Law | Sep 12, 2007 9:41:21 AM
While I appreciate Charlie's comments regarding this issue, I have to point out one major flaw in his argument: maternity leave is not paid at the majority of businesses in the US, and insurance does not usually cover maternity leave. Short-term disability insurance will cover maternity leave, but only a small percentage of one's salary, and there is a long waiting period in which you must be on the policy in order to become eligible for such a benefit.
As a working mother with an infant, I feel I am at a disadvantage when trying to advance my career. Knowing that I will be out of the office for weeks at a time with each pregnancy, that limits my potential for accepting positions at new companies because I won't have qualified for benefits in time. And let's face it, no company wants to hire a pregnant woman, or even a woman with an infant at home as this automatically infers she will be out of the office frequently.
Therefore, my male peers advance much more quickly, even though I have the same dedication and qualifications.
I can't wait until we catch up with European countries on this issue!
Posted by: tasha | Sep 12, 2007 5:25:38 PM
Regarding the response to my comments, allow me to point out I am a father of 2 (12 and 5), and my wife is a SAHM. Now obviously that means the topic, per se, of "mothers advancing in their career" isn't something I can address, specifically. I am, however, a Team Lead in my company and thus I have some insight to offer.
For starters, no one should be treated unfairly: that includes firings for pregnancy, pass over for promotions/advancement under the guise a woman MIGHT get pregnant, etc.
But by the same token, a fair assessment must be made on all employees based on their performance and experience.
Case in point: A male colleague of mine took two months off under FMLA to be with his newborn (with his accrued vacation, he was out 10 weeks). I salute his decision. We were on a paralell career path until that.
That guy was passed over for the promotion I earned to become team lead. Do I think that is fair?
Damn straight.
We were both equally qualified, up to the point where he took 10 weeks off from the job. Where he had/has a benefit that is unquantifiable (that he was home with spouse and newborn), I have the time in. It isn't unfair at all.
If any employee takes an extended leave of absense (paid or otherwise), while the company may wish to extend fringe benefits (i.e. health care) they ought not make that employee equal with those who did not take leave.
Posted by: Charlie on the PA Turnpike | Sep 17, 2007 9:49:10 AM
I live & work in India and do not understand all the attitudes discussed here. Oh, I am a father of two (8 year old daughter & a 3 year old son). Both my wife and I have full time jobs and our kids are in school. Grandparents live 1500 miles away and neighbor support is non existent (they either don't have the time or we cannot entrust our children to them).
We are both engineers and there is no question of "should she"? She wants to work and so she does. The extra income is welcome but not necessary.
My wife's company (Indian) provides maternity leave as follows - 6 months at full pay, plus 3 months at half pay, plus any vacation leave accrued at full pay, plus any additional time at no pay, for a total of 1 year. No loss of seniority. No paternity leave though. My company (huge American co with offices in India), provides 3 months of maternity at full pay, plus 2 additional weeks at half pay if you ask for it and 1 week of paternity leave. No idea about loss of seniority or other similar issues at my company.
Both my wife's bosses in the last 9 years have been ogres. Bad luck. But she has managed to survive and flourish (no missed promotions etc). I have not yet come across this thing called a supportive boss. There are many people who would love to have my job. Bosses don't have to care.
No onsite day care available. Or childcare assistance. At her company or mine. I hear that Microsoft has onsite day care at their Hyderabad campus. The best I can get is a list of day care centers that our Employee Club has shortlisted and who give us a special deal (read discount).
I have access to alternative work arrangements like telecommuting but it is frowned upon (I know it is an American company but this is India mate). So we use it only when absolutely necessary. My wife has no such facilities.
New school calendar? Forget it! No parent will support it, whatever be the cost of the current system and the benefits of a revamp. The competition is so high that kids *must* WORK HARD! Every year half a million students appear for the engineering entrance exam to the top engineering colleges, the IITs, and about 3000 make it.
Supportive spouse? Have to ask my wife about that :-) But yes, I agree. It won't work otherwise.
College savings plan & health care? Forget it! We don't even have Social Security. If I lose my job I have only my savings to fall back on.
Now the stuff I didn't understand -
1. Sue's comments. "You wanna have kids and work - fine, great - but do it on your own time and deal with it and leave my job and duties out of it". Is this a common attitude? Is there a problem if a section of the work force that needs special support is provided with it? Does it matter that there are special parking slots for physically challenged people, men or women?
Every 3rd person in this world is either a chinese (Oh My God!) or an Indian (Great!). I would think the rest of the world would welcome whatever can be done for people who make babies.
2. Charlie's second comment. "If any employee takes an extended leave of absence (paid or otherwise), while the company may wish to extend fringe benefits (i.e. health care) they ought not make that employee equal with those who did not take leave." How can the company penalize me if I am entitled to that leave? You cannot say that I can take X days off and then penalize me for doing just that!
Nice article. My congratulations.
Posted by: Gautam Satpathy | Sep 17, 2007 3:05:56 PM
Gautam,
Regarding your statement that "You cannot say that I can take X days off and then penalize me for doing just that":
if two candidates are equal and qualified for a position, with the exception that one person has more consecutive time in on the job than the other, that person should gain more experience and thus have an edge?
Just because the other person took time off -- and remember in my example, it was 10 weeks -- doesn't mean ought to have the same standing as the people who worked during that period.
Were it the other way round, I would not have a problem with a colleague being named to a Lead position. How is this not fair in your eyes?
Posted by: Charlie on the PA Turnpike | | Sep 17, 2007 10:17:09 PM
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