Last year, Times Opinion asked readers to tell us about their journey to motherhood. Almost 2,000 responded, and an overwhelming number were not actually focused on the path to parenthood. Instead, readers wanted to talk about the challenges they experienced after their children arrived.
Their struggles are encapsulated well by Patsy Freeland of New Jersey, one of the dozens of women my colleagues followed up with, who said, “I was not prepared for how inflexible work would be, how expensive it would be and how much our society and economic systems are built off of taking my labor as a mother for granted.” Her words perfectly illustrate the “motherhood penalty” as depicted in the video above.
Technically, the motherhood penalty is the notion that when women become mothers, they earn less money and their wages tend to decrease with each child. When men become fathers, their wages increase, especially among the highest-earning men. That’s the “fatherhood premium.” Inflation over the past several years has made the motherhood penalty feel even more like a punishment.
While the motherhood penalty has been the term of art for what happens to working women when they become mothers, it does not encompass the financial hit taken by the stay-at-home parent. This financial burden isn’t just temporary, either — it stretches all the way to retirement.
Mothers have less money in personal retirement accounts, and they also receive less money from Social Security because they’re more likely to have gaps in their employment history, and their caregiving isn’t valued by society in the way that it should be. Which is to say, caregiving is neither paid nor truly respected.
Because child care has long been more expensive than a mortgage payment in most states, many women feel that their choices are constrained. They’re not always working because they want to, or staying home because they want to — they’re trying to complete a financial puzzle that has several pieces missing. Of course, many fathers feel this, too, but culturally, they’re pushed more into breadwinning than women tend to be (which may not be what makes them happiest, but it does make them more financially solvent).
