Christmas is a great time of year, especially because you get to see your family, surrounded by the glow of a Christmas tree and holiday spirit. What’s not very merry about this time of year? Your family asking intrusive questions about your life plans. I’m pretty lucky at the moment, because no one is asking me about settling down, or if I’m going to get engaged soon, or when I plan on having kids, but I notice this with my older female cousins, who are only about five to ten years older than me.
There seems to be a prevailing interest not in women’s accomplishments or work, but rather in our domestic sphere, and future kids. Even when I come home, and coo over a baby in a department store or at a restaurant, my mother beams and talks about how I am going to be a great mother, and how excited she is for me to have babies. I do want to hopefully in the future have children, but I am unsure how in today’s world that is possible if I want to have a career.
Many women my mother’s age and older criticize couples who have not had children, but I am unsure how to explain to them that fifty years ago women couldn’t attend my college. My grandmother did not have to choose between work and family, the choice was pretty much made for her. She was a choir director at a church on Sundays and spent the rest of her time doting on her husband and chasing my mother, aunts, and uncles. I’m not criticizing her choice, but I believe it may frame her generation, and indeed my mother’s generational idea that women can have children and work when that choice has only truly been offered for half a century.
Today, women are expected to somehow do it all, which I believe is an empowering sentiment, but one that seems like a very difficult challenge to mount. Stand-up comedian Michelle Wolf perhaps describes it best when she says “…There’s a lot of people out there that are like, ‘But Michelle, you don’t have to choose. You can have it all! Women can have it all!’ Yeah, stop saying that. You act like ‘all’ is good. ‘All’ does not mean good. You’ve never left an all-you-can-eat buffet and thought, ‘I feel really good about myself. I sure am glad I went back for spare ribs.’” All is not good. And even if we do try to have it all, even if a woman out there definitely wants it all, we’ve put up too many obstacles in your way to make it possible.”
Wolf has a great point, as there are many systematic challenges to women being mothers and part of the workforce, even with how far society has come, the most prominent being a working mother. According to The Mom Project, “43% of highly skilled women leave the workforce after becoming mothers.”
This is a staggering percentage, particularly a hundred years after the Equal Rights Amendment. But why does this exist? Several systematic issues cause women to be forced to leave the workplace when they have children begins at the heart of the issue, a numbers game.
Most people, as I hope to, graduate from college around the age of 22 or 23. Lowering medical costs, rising taxes, house prices, and little economic stability led to the necessity to attend higher education. Law school or grad school is typically three years, so without a gap year, most people are 25 or 26 by the time they finish their education. I hesitate to generalize as it is possible to attend school and have children, it is not ideal, so I believe most people typically wait. Then, pursuing that people take four years to find an objectively stable job that pays well, you’re thirty. People, particularly women, would have had to get married while attempting to stabilize their careers in order to be able to beauty the biological clock and have children.
According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, “A woman’s peak reproductive years are between the late teens and late 20s. By age 30, fertility (the ability to get pregnant) starts to decline. This decline happens faster once you reach your mid-30s.” This means women should have a baby in their early thirties should they wish to have multiple children or avoid fertility issues and birth complications.
But if we also believe The Bureau of Labor’s statistic that the first five years of your career are the most important to advancement and establishment, then the five years of being pregnant you are trying to prove yourself happen on no sleep with a crying baby. This numbers game affects women at a greater rate because we actually carry the baby.
While most women have a six-week recovery, complications or even a want to spend time with your newborn child likely extend this number. Further, businesses are less likely to hire women who are pregnant, express plans to have children or have children because of insurance costs and the presumption that a woman will have to miss work in order to have a baby or leave early to attend to something with their children.
While companies are not supposed to ask these questions, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says, “Federal law does not prohibit employers from asking you whether you are or intend to become pregnant. However, because such questions may indicate a possible intent to discriminate based on pregnancy, we recommend that employers avoid these types of questions.”
In an idea world this wouldn’t matter, but The Guardian reported that in a survey of 500 managers of various companies, “40% of managers avoid hiring younger women to get around maternity leave.” Therefore, young women, even those who do not want to have children face severe discrimination as they look for work.
Another complication for women in the workplace is the cost of a child. While people say children are priceless, they are in fact a daily household income. According to a study by LendingTree, “the average annual cost of child-rearing stood at $21,681 in 2021,” yearly, not including childcare. Of course, that figure is for only one child, as opposed to two or more.
According to care.com, daycare can cost $14,768 on average per year, while a nanny is $38,272 on average per year, both of which are over 50% increases from their previous studies rates in 2013. However, it’s hard to tell if this number even aptly captures the cost of food, heating, clothing, cribs, soccer balls, toys, piano lessons, school supplies, prom dresses and tuxedos, phones, glasses, braces, jewelry, watches, or an education.
At face value, a couple with college degrees who have children by the age of thirty may bring in a net paycheck of $105,872 (the doubled average earning of someone between the ages of 24 and 35 in 2023 according to Forbes), meaning in total to care for their child they are spending 34% of their income, approximately $36,449 per year. Additionally, with the current state of the housing crisis, rising costs of food, and hiked prices on cars, supporting a family seems very improbable.
My mother perhaps provides an unusual example; she has a successful career in HR, and since I was born has been the breadwinner in my family, and her example has inspired me to be a working mother. However, a very relevant number is the fact that my mother, like most women, makes 84 cents less than her male counterpart on average (National Women’s Law Center).
While 84 cents seems insignificant, let’s apply it to a salaried position. Let’s say hypothetically a man and a woman both work the same position for the same pay in human resources. While hypothetically both of them would make $82,294 (the average pay of someone in Human Resources after 3-5 years at a company), it is far more likely that the woman only makes $69,126.96.
With this wage gap, it makes sense that more often than not, it is the woman who becomes the stay-at-home parent, because it is likely they make less than their husband, even though they are just as qualified, due to sexism. It is important to note that this wage gap increases for women of minority communities. Of course, this also assumes that a woman has the option of a dual income. The numbers for a single mother become even tighter, as they somehow have to care for the child on their own, while also working to ensure that they can clothe and feed the child.
Men do not face the same problem in the workforce, not because they are absent (a narrative I particularly dislike because I have a very dedicated stay-at-home father), but because they don’t have to spend nine months with a baby inside, a full calendar of baby showers and doctor appointments, and then another five months of constantly needing to be near your child for breastfeeding.
The United States prides itself on the fact that it is far more advanced than other countries in percentages of women in the workplace. Yet, in Europe, many women are provided far greater opportunities to both work and be a mother in terms of health care, and time off. Essentially, the United States allows women “greater” and “equal” opportunities in access to jobs. However, Europe is less productive than the US in workplace productivity which allows women greater
freedom in the workplace. I wonder what it says about our country that we care more about productivity than people.
Look at the law industry, which I someday hope to enter. According to statistics, more women than men attend school. However, despite men being in lower percentiles in grades as well as only making up 44.4% of attendees in law school (Above The Law), they are more likely to be hired by law firms. As such, women have to fight harder for jobs. Most law firms are less likely to hire mothers, as well as young women because they are seen as less reliable because they could be out on maternity leave. If someone suffers from post-natal depression the ramifications are extreme professionally. This is of course, illegal, but it still occurs regularly within the workplace.
So women in their thirties are attempting to find jobs, partially out of necessity, but also because we deserve to follow our passions and support ourselves at the prime of having a child. Having a child is expensive, now more than ever, so where does this leave women? Stuck in a numbers game.
Until society allows, or rather, women are given the power to have the life they wish from a male-driven society, the number of women having children will lessen year by year. And that doesn’t make us irresponsible, or anything women of my grandmother’s generation may call us. Rather, I believe it makes us pragmatists.
Yes, I still want to be a mother someday…maybe. I do not want women, particularly my fellow peers, to think we are forced to choose between having a child or having a successful career, or even that they have to have children at all. However, for those of us who may want to someday have children, it seems as though we are always forced to stare at the glass ceiling while trying to take care of our children. I want to be a mother, but not at the expense of my career.
So where does this leave us? What do I tell my mother, my friends, and my someday husband? Fix the system. Women deserve to live the life they want, be it single, with children, or childless, but women can only truly be mothers when they don’t have to choose between personal advancement and a family. So maybe it’s time for a positive change, for a working system like Europe’s where all people are prioritized and personal happiness, not the bottom line, means women are not forced to choose between our dreams.