Working Mother

Archive for June, 2009

As my colleague Anne Newman has discussed on this blog, the Real Housewives of New Jersey are far from real.

In the episode that aired on June 9, Teresa gets new “bubbies,” Danielle breaks up with her twentysomething boyfriend, and Jacqueline arranges a photo shoot for her teenage daughter with a celebrity photographer. You can find an extended recap here on Gawker.

However, one very “real” moment stuck out in the episode. Dina, who has a hybrid career as an event planner and decorator, reveals that she’s tired of juggling work with her family responsibilities.

Granted, Dina makes this proclamation while she’s away on a “girl’s weekend” at a hot new Atlantic City restaurant as she is sipping what appears to be a mojito . But it was as close to reality as possible to hear that she fears she is missing out on her daughter Lexi’s childhood.

She writes on her Bravo TV blog (yep, she blogs!) the following:

I am realizing that before I know it, (Lexi) will be out of the house and I can’t get these precious years back. I’m starting to see that my career may have to take a back seat for a while. I could always pick up where I left off when she is 18 and off in college. I still have my days while she is in school to dabble, but I really want my nights and weekends that are usually spent at events back. Let’s see what happens!

For a split second there, Dina almost seems like real housewife. From the promo for the season finale, it looks we’ll have to wait until next season to see if reality bites.

Go to Source

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the spirited conversation on The Motherhood Penalty so far.

I will be interviewing Stanford professor Shelley Correll, co-author of the study Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty? that sparked this debate. (For those of you who missed the discussion, Correll and her co-authors fournd that the pay gap between mothers and childless women is actually bigger than the pay gap between women and men.)

Several of you questioned how hiring managers knew the women who applied for jobs were moms in the first place. I emailed Correll and it turns out they listed “PTA officer” on fake resumes used in the study.

What other questions do you have about this research? Let me know, and I’ll include them in my interview when I speak to Correll.

Go to Source

What is the wage penalty for working mothers when compared to women without children?

Apparently it is a big one.

While study after study focuses on the gender gap in wages, the pay gap between mothers and childless women is actually bigger than the pay gap between women and men, according to sociologist Shelley Correll, Stephen Benard, and In Paik. Their study, Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty? received the 2008 Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Excellence in Work-Family Research at the World at Work conference this week in Seattle.

Using fake resumes for two equally qualified candidates–one childless, one a mom—the researchers found that the mother was 100% less likely to be hired when she applied for a position. Mothers were consistently ranked as less competent and less committed than non-moms. “They were also offered $11,000 a year less pay, on average, than an equally qualified childless candidate,” Correll says in the author interview that accompanies the award.

And what about men? Fathers got higher ratings than non-dads.

In another study, the researchers used more faux resumes to apply to 638 jobs during an 18-month period. Tracking interview requests, childless women got 2.1 times as many callbacks as mothers with similar credentials. As for the guys? There was no difference among fathers and childless men.

When asked if she was surprised by these findings, Correll, who is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Stanford University, says:

I was not surprised to find that mothers were discriminated against, but I was very surprised by the magnitude of the discrimination. With gender or race, we often talk about the subtle ways that stereotypes are disadvantaging. With mothers, the effects were huge, such as being about 100% less likely to be recommended for hire than childless women and being offered much lower starting salaries.

Are you as surprised or shocked by this research as I was? Does a pay gap for working moms and their childless counterparts exist in your workplace?

Go to Source

Layoffs, pay cuts, unpaid furloughs–all popular corporate cost-cutting tools during this recession, and all primarily hitting the workers on the floor, not the executives in the corner offices. Pay cuts in particular are growing in popularity, as BusinessWeek’s Jena McGregor wrote last week in Cutting Salaries Instead of Jobs (and I blogged about in March in What Would You Give Up To Save Your Job?). A survey this year by Hewitt Associates found that 16% of 518 large U.S. employers have made salary cuts during the recession, and another 21% are considering one.

And then there is Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, one of Boston’s leading hospitals. When CEO Paul Levy learned that the hospital was facing a $20 million deficit this year, he figured he would have to lay off at least 600 staffers, 10% of the total. Most of the targeted workers were struggling at the bottom of the pay scale. But Levy thought first he would try a different approach. He took a 10% pay cut himself and asked all the 13 department heads, many of them world-famous physicians, to make a sacrifice as well. Each donated about $27,000 from their annual pay, coming up with $350,000 in savings. Levy then asked the 1,100 doctors affiliated with the hospital to make a sacrifice, and checks started pouring in, some as high as $10,000 and $15,000, raising another $326,000. He also asked senior management to take pay cuts, and ended 401K matching funds. Perhaps most impressive, he acknowledged that the workers themselves might have some thoughts on saving money, and asked them for ideas. Levy opened the hospital’s books to all the employees, so they would understand how dire the situation, and called a huge staff meeting in the hospital auditorium. There Levy said:

I want to run an idea by you that I think is important, and I’d like to get your reaction to it. I’d like to do what we can to protect the lower-wage earners–the transporters, the housekeepers, the food service people. A lot of these people work really hard, and I don’t want to put an additional burden on them.

Now, if we protect these workers, it means the rest of us will have to make a bigger sacrifice. It means that others will have to give up more of their salary or benefits.”

According to a Boston Globe story, the ideas started pouring in, hundreds of emails an hour:

The consensus was that the workers don’t want anyone to get laid off and are willing to give up pay and benefits to make sure no one does. A nurse said her floor voted unanimously to forgo a 3% raise. A guy in finance who got laid off from his last job at a hospital in Rhode Island suggested working one less day a week. Another nurse said she was willing to give up some vacation and sick time. A respiratory therapist suggested eliminating bonuses.

In the end, Beth Israel came up with enough savings that it only needed to lay off 70 workers.

Beth Israel’s strategy is so unusual that both ABC News and CBS Evening News did features about it. At the end of the CBS report, Levy asked “Why doesn’t this happen more often in America?” Why indeed? Any thoughts?

If you want more insight into Paul Levy’s management strategy, and lots of other fun facts, check out his blog, Running A Hospital.

Go to Source

A revelation for Working Parents in this week’s New York Times: “Among elite white-collar fields, finance appears to be uniquely difficult for anyone trying to combine work and family.”

Harvard professors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have embarked on an exhaustive project, called Harvard and Beyond, examining the careers and family trajectories of highly educated men and women. (In other words, what is referred to as work-life balance.) Their conclusion? Finance isn’t an ideal profession for work-life balance, particularly for working moms.

Their research shows that men and women with masters of business administration degrees have nearly identical incomes at the start of their careers, but their earnings soon diverge: men significantly outearn their female counterparts 10 to 16 years later.

Goldin and Katz cite several reasons for the earnings gap, but the biggest one is that women take a pause in their careers to have children. “It appears that many MBA mothers, especially those with well-off spouses, decide to slow down within a few years following their first birth,” according to the study.

Off the top of my head, I can count at least 10 female friends who left lucrative investment banking and finance jobs to stay at home with their kids. Interestingly enough, one of them on-ramped in the past few years, returning to a major investment bank as an equity analyst. She was just named Best on the Street by The Wall Street Journal in her industry group. (I’d out her, but I didn’t tell her I was writing this.)

Flexibility is key to the all-star analyst’s situation and, most likely, to her success. She works from home much of the week.

Interestingly enough, B-schools are helping families make the transition to academic life, as more students with partners and young children head to campus. But that also means more B-Schoolers are learning the work-life lesson a lot earlier as they juggle school along with family responsibilities.

Another mommy friend who is a consultant in Los Angeles posted something on Facebook earlier this week about work-life balance that caught my eye. One of her clients told her, “I think work/life balance is a crock. Nobody is off the clock.”

What do you think? Is there ANY career that lets women as well as men get the best of both worlds?

Go to Source

I had my epiphany on the perils of teen texting about four months ago, when I opened my T-Mobile bill for December. It was $200 higher than the usual monthly charge because of a singular amount of texting one day in December from my daughter’s phone: some (OMG!) 400 messages.

Never mind that my 14-year-old swore up and down that she didn’t do it because her phone (an antique from early this century) was too old for her to text easily, that she had a fever of 102 that day and appeared to have been sleeping during the pertinent hours, that never before had our text message volume exceeded our 400-texts-a-month joint allotment—T-Mobile wasn’t buying any of my protestations. The customer service manager (yes, I argued up to the manager level) was even more scornful than the rep: “She’s a teenager. Believe me, they can text even when they have a fever.”

We never solved that mystery. So as soon as our contract with T-Mobile expired two months later, we jumped to another company and took an unlimited text messaging plan. I didn’t want to expose myself to such charges again but was unwilling to relinquish a useful stealth tool for my daughter to check in with me when she’s with her friends.

Now I may seem a fool. No, I don’t think I was wrong to give my daughter the benefit of a doubt, but according to a New York Times piece on teen texting, by making unlimited messaging available I may be making my kid vulnerable to a multitude of ills: “anxiety, distraction in school, falling grades, repetitive stress injury, and sleep deprivation.”

The Times cited a Nielsen study saying that spurred by unlimited text plans, American teens sent an average of 80 text messages a day in the fourth quarter of 2008, almost double the average the year before.

It interviewed Dr. Martin Joffe, a California pediatrician who recently surveyed students at two high schools and found that kids were leaving their cell phones turned on through the night and were responding to texts at all hours. “That’s going to cause sleep issues in an age group that’s already plagued with sleep issues.”

Meanwhile Sherry Turkle, a psychologist at MIT, said that texting might be causing a shift in the way adolescents develop, as the phone link (the reason I like texts) makes it harder for kids to separate from their parents. And, the piece said, texting may be taking a toll on teens’ thumbs, citing the case of Annie Wagner, a 9th grader from Bethesda, Md., who developed cramping in her digits that only eased after she changed phone and texted more slowly.

Yes, I worry about how technology is affecting my daughter’s maturation and the way she relates to others, but I think we would do parents a disfavor if we single out texting. A site called InjuryBoard.com, citing an American Journal of Psychiatry report, warns about Internet compulsive behavior and lists excessive gaming, e-mail, and virtual sex, in addition to texting, as culprits. (One symptom: A constant need for more time with your computer and to upgrade your equipment.)

If I’m worried about my kid abusing technology, I’d regulate (and I am) her use of all the gadgets in her tool kit, not just text.

Go to Source

Would you take career advice from a workaholic?

Cornell University’s 2009 graduating class heard work-life tips from David Plouffe, President Barack Obama’s campaign manager.

According to The Cornell Daily Sun, Plouffe, 42, said that while he has had an extraordinarily successful career, the “real scorecard is not the number of electoral votes I scored, but my relationships with my friends and family.”

Plouffe—who has a son and whose daughter was born two days after the 2008 Presidential election—also stressed the importance of striking a balance between work and time with family and friends, although it is clear that he is totally out of whack in that category: When Plouffe managed the Harkin presidential campaign at the age of 24, he went an entire month without speaking to his parents. And during the past two years, he often only had two or three hours of free time per week, the Sun reports.

“Even Bernie Madoff would say that math isn’t right,” Plouffe said. “But I knew exactly who I wanted to spend [that time] with. I just had to figure out when and how.”

“I was a phantom, doing important and increasingly remote things that were interesting to read about, but [simultaneously] began to make me somewhat of a caricature. Over the last two years, as I lived out the dream of every professional in my field, I could only do so by becoming somewhat of a ghost of a father and a husband,” Plouffe said.

According to The Cornell Chronicle, Plouffe also told graduating seniors they “are now prepared to play a large role in shaping history for generations to come, who will be studying their accomplishments in these hallowed halls.”

But, he warned them, “You must have passion for your work. And you’d better really treasure and get the most out of your non-working hours…those are the increments of time that will define your life.”

How do you think David Plouffe spent the holiday weekend: working or hanging out with his family and friends?

I did not check work email once during the long weekend, which was spent at the beach. Alas, that could be a stupid precedent, according to my colleague Cathy Arnst, who reports that employees “who are actually foolish enough to take a vacation in these perilous economic times should stay connected to the office if they don’t want to be out of a job when they return.”

How did you spend the Memorial Day holiday? Did you manage to amp up your life-related activities? Or did you end up working most of the time because you are paranoid about losing your job?

Go to Source

Dreaming about your summer vacation? Well, stop. According to the outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas, employees who are actually foolish enough to take a vacation in these perilous economic times should stay connected to the office if they don’t want to be out of a job when they return. So be sure to take your cell phone, laptop, pager and electronic organizer wherever you go.

Oh dear oh dear. Just when we need a vacation more than ever, we can’t have one. According to CareerBuilder’s annual vacation survey, 35% of workers are not taking a vacation this year; 71% of those say they can’t afford it. Additionally, close to one in five workers said they are either afraid of losing their jobs if they go on vacation or feel guilty being away from the office. Other sad findings from the survey of 4,435 U.S. workers, done between Feb 20 and March 11:

Half (50%) of employers say they expect employees to check in with the office while they are away, with 40% indicating it’ll be necessary only if they are working on a big project or if there is a major issue going on with the company. Close to three-in-ten (28%) say they plan to contact the office at least once, regardless of what they are working on, while they are on vacation.

How much do you want to bet that the majority of companies will tell any employee foolish to ask that, “of course there is a big project or major issue going on, better stay in touch. And why not take some work with you while you’re at it?”

Here’s some discomforting words of advice from Challenger Gray:

The advice of wellness experts who urge workers to cut off all contact with the office while on vacation would be fine in a Utopian world. But we live in the fiercely competitive real world, where employers cannot afford to put any piece of business in jeopardy because you are purposely unreachable. Now is a particularly bad time to provoke any doubt about your commitment, because the pool of available, skilled replacements grows daily.

I learned about the Challenger press release on the ZDNet blog Between The Lines. The entry, appropriately titled The Just Shoot Me Vacation, has some pretty funny comments:

The general theme of Challenger’s advice isn’t to actually work, but to look like you’re working. That’s productive. Here’s Challenger’s advice with my comments in italics:
* Arrange with your hotel to have a fax machine installed in your room. Chain hotels favored by business guests already have done so. Yes, your boss will be damn impressed that you have a fax machine in your room—especially since he hasn’t used one since 1995.
* While most of the large hotels now offer Internet connections (some free, some for a fee), some of the smaller hotels and motels favored by budget-conscious travelers may not. Prior to leaving, visit websites that can help you locate Wi-Fi hotspots near your hotel. Translation: Spend your vacation in Starbucks.

Keep reading for more of blogger Larry Dignan’s take on the Paranoid Holiday.

Now, I admit, to me vacation is sacred. I worked for Reuters News Service for many years, where the Brits, God love ‘em, gave everyone 6 weeks vacation the day they started. Spoiled me for life. I of course am taking vacation, and I’m only bringing my laptop so I can look up recipes while on the beach (well, I might check an email or two, but I’ll fight the urge, really I will). What are your plans? Vacation, staycation, no-cation or working “vacation?” And anyone have any tips on how to fake work while on your real vacation?

Go to Source

Making Life Better is a lifestyle site covering great topics such as food and drink, beauty and style, home and family as well as wellness and other tips. Be sure to check out the news and offers with savings, sweepstakes and more.

I signed up for a free membership and I found you can save articles and recipes, make comments and share tips with others. There’s even a Making Life Better YouTube channel that has some great, easy and cost effective meal ideas featuring such handy items as Knorr Sides, Lipton Recipe Secrets, Hellman’s Mayonnaise and more.

Be sure to check out the great Family Fun Book (.pdf) on the site filled with fun, affordable recipes using trusted brands for lots of occasions. I got to try out a variety of the products and we’re partial to the Upside Down Deep Dish pizza.

I really liked this site. It’s attractive, easy to use and the meal ideas are practical for people like me without a lot of time. It’s really worth a look, I think you’ll like it!

Making Life Better is brought to you by the good folks at Unilever, home of such well known food, personal care and home care brands such as Hellman’s, Lipton, Knorr, Bertolli, Suave, Vaseline, Ponds and more.

This post in conjunction with Mom Central
Go to Source

Mamapedia is an online resource of mothers sharing wisdom and advice with other mothers. It’s a searchable compilation of what people have shared though the Mamasource community about kids in all stages.

Since they emphasize that it’s about kids of “all ages” and I have a teenager (as well as a pre-teen and a school-ager), I decided to test out it’s teen powers as many of these types of sites concentrates on babies and toddlers.

I searched “teen driver’s license rules” as this is something that’s getting ready to be big ion our house in the not too distant future, and I was pleased to see that there is a lot of real advice in there, and that there’s a way to indicate if you find the advice helpful or not.

While there are lots of parenting communities and forums out there, I liked this format, it narrows down the information and it’s an easy to use interface.

Mamapedia is free and it’s updated daily and the questions and answers are by real moms who’ve “been there”.

This post in conjunction with Mom Central
Go to Source