There are many false myths surrounding working mothers, most of which carry their fair share of negativity and judgment. These are oftentimes erroneous ideas about what it means to be a striving, growing and thriving working mom. Unfortunately, these are also ideas that pervade our society, workplaces and social environments, and work against positively understanding and supporting working mothers in and outside of the workplace.
These misconceptions are at the root of most of the systemic inequities in pay, benefits and perceived ability and competence, encountered by mothers in the workplace. As a matter of fact, research by the National Women’s Law Center’s shows U.S. mothers working full-time being paid on average $18,000 less per year than fathers. This loss in earnings is compounded for mothers of color and in some states. This financial loss, also coined as the “motherhood penalty”, further affects working moms’ ability to be hired, promoted, and generally recognized and rewarded in their careers. The COVID-19 pandemic, with the combined impact of remote work and amplified childcare demands, has managed to amplify these biases against working moms. As a result, one in four women is considering a career downshift or exit post-pandemic, according to the 2020 McKinsey & Company’s Women in the Workplace report.
Outside of the workplace, these false myths contribute to the existing and growing “backlash effect” against professionally thriving working women and moms alike. These are the negative social and economic effects women and moms experience for behaving counter-stereotypically by engaging in self-promotion, or showing themselves to be competent and ambitious.
As a working mom, you may have experienced the impact of these misconceptions in and outside of work. You may as a result have had to deal with being perceived in a negative way, and maybe feeling guilt as a result of it, or having to defend your personal and professional choices at your own expense.
Here are some of these false myths and misconceptions you may recognize:
She must not have enough time to dedicate to her career and her family
Working moms have notoriously been penalized for, well…being working moms. One of the wide-ranging assumptions made about them is that once they have children, they are now limited in their careers. It’s widely assumed that working mothers do not have the necessary time and dedication to grow and advance in their careers, and as a result, are kept out of advancement and growth opportunities at work.
She must be less competent because she has kids
Another false assumption surrounding working mothers, is that they tend to be less competent. It is as if having children somehow lessens one’s intelligence and ability to function in the workplace. The reality is much different however. Mothers bring an unprecedented and unique set of skills at all levels of organizations, from the administrative desk to the boardroom. Yet, as revealed by the Modern Family Index, 60% of working Americans admit to career opportunities being afforded to less qualified employees rather than more competent working moms.
If she spends time at work, she must not be spending time with her children
While many of the misconceptions around working mothers are centered on their imagined professional deficiencies, many are direct attacks at their very ability to mother. Many a working mom has had to deal with the muted, or not-so-muted reproaches as to their career and schedule choices. Somehow, the antiquated notion that women cannot combine work and family casts a shadow of doubt on working mothers, relegating them to the ranks of lesser mothers by virtue of the time they spend at work or at home.
If she spends a lot of time at work, she must not have a good marriage
The same assumption as the one pervading working moms’ relationships with their children, also surrounds their marriages relationship with their significant others. False ideas about working mothers may have us believe they make poor partners or wives, and may not be dedicated enough to their relationships. Yet, a 2011 study in the Journal of Psychologyreveals higher marital satisfaction in couples where the wife continued working after kids. As women work more outside of the home, their partners may be more inclined to step up more at home and with the kids. On the other hand, there may be more of a perception that women working from home, or stay-at-home moms, may be available to handle all of the household duties.
If you’re been reading and nodding your head along, you may very well have experienced one, or many, if not all of these false myths about being a working mom. Beyond being just grossly inaccurate and borderline insulting, these are also misconceptions that carry too heavy a weight for mothers. It is up to each and every one of us to not only acknowledge these, but also to stop feeding, even if unconsciously, these false ideas. Instead, in each and every one of our capacities as women and men, it is our responsibility to change the narrative around what it truly means to be a working mother, and prompt our organizations, structures and society, to r-create a more accurate and better suited story around working moms.
Small businesses owned by women and people of color, have historically been under-represented and under-capitalized. More specifically, women-owned businesses’ share of business revenues has consistently remained at roughly 4% for the past 20 years. This is what a new legislation called the Providing Real Opportunities for Growth to Rising Entrepreneurs for Sustained Success, also known as the PROGRESS Act. This new legislation is aimed at helping women and minority-owned businesses grow by promoting increased investment in them.
This bill could not come in at a better time, as women and minority-owned businesses have been hit particularly hard by the pandemic. By boosting investments in these businesses, there is increased opportunity to help them get back on their feet and rebuild for the future. In addition, it would also be a way to level the playing field for women and minority-owned businesses that are usually at a disadvantage as compared to their male-led counterparts. Male-led entrepreneurial ventures start with twice as much capital as those that are women-led. Access to third-party capital is even more precarious, with only 2.3% of venture capital funding that went to female-founded companies. As part of this, Black and Hispanic-owned firms, which constitute 50% of all women-owned businesses, could only obtain 0.0006% and 0.32% of venture capital funding in the past 10 years.
The bill includes the First Employee Credit, which would give a credit equal to 25% of W-2 wages claimed annually, up to an amount of $10,000 in a single tax year. The lifetime limit for this credit would be $40,000. This credit would applied against a business’ payroll tax, which would help many businesses that are unable to generate a profit in their first years. Businesses eligible for this credit would be required to be majority US-owned, with their owners earning $100,000 or less a year (or $200,000 for joint filers).
Another tax credit, the Investor Credit, is to promote third-party investments in small businesses. This would apply to up to 50% of a qualified equity investment or debt, up to $10,000 in a single year, with a lifetime limit of $50,000. To be eligible, businesses would need to have at least one full-time employee. Additionally, majority owners would have to be American and earn $100,000 or less a year (or $200,000 for joint filers).
This bill is part of a larger effort by Congressional Democrats to reduce income inequality. In line with this goal, the American Jobs Plan to fund social programs and improvements in infrastructure with an increased corporate tax rate of 28%, was also unveiled last month. There is also an expectation that an American Families Plan, with the goal to extend the Child Tax Credit by providing additional tax credits to for families through an increased top tax rate for individuals and the taxing of capital gains as ordinary income, will also be introduced.
Dear Working Mom is our periodic love letter to working moms everywhere, dealing with motherhood, career, and lifestyle topics…
Dear Working Mom,
You may have considered the next step in your career for quite some time now. You may have asked yourself a thousand different questions, and imagined a thousand different scenarios. How would this change affect your family? How would the kids react? Would you still be able to keep the same schedule? Who would pick up the kids? What would you be missing out on? So many questions swirling in your head, mixed in with the anticipation and fear of moving to the next level of your career…
You’re certainly not alone…Right there along with you, are countless women playing the chess game of working motherhood. One in which career and life decisions carry more than their weight of implications, ramifications and consequences. For a working mom, a career decision is not just a career decision. It’s a family choice, a community perspective, with deeper and more impactful ramifications than one could imagine, from smaller logistical consequences such as picking up and dropping off the kids to school, to larger outcomes such as the choice to have a baby or the survival of a marriage.
Yes, taking the next step in your career as a working mom is a heavy decision, even with the world’s accolades and the support of your closest ones. The quiet, compulsive voice of motherhood guilt, rendered louder by years of societal conditioning, still raises its discouraging tone at every turn. So does the silent judgment of those unable or unwilling to accept your growth and progress…
Yet, your battle is not with the decision at hand. Neither is it with the opportunity in front of you. Your battle, the real battle, is with the voice of guilt threatening to overtake the purpose and vision set aside for you. It is with the silent judgment of those who deny you the power to expand into the fullest version of yourself. Most importantly, it is with the version of yourself that still believes in the guilt, the judgment, the inadequacy that were never yours to carry.
Dear Working Mom,
Don’t be afraid to take the next step, to move forward and grow in your purpose. Your work matters. While it may mean that some things may have to change, even that some hard choices may have to be made, when growth is possible and feasible, don’t let it slide. Not out of fear, not out of guilt, not out of judgment…
Not out of anything that may rob your children, your family, your community, from witnessing what is possible for women who dare to take the next step, against all odds.
What is the next step in your work, and are you afraid to take it? Share your story with us. Email us at corporate@thecorporatesister.com
2020 has exposed racial trauma in a way no one could have predicted, especially as it was coupled with a global pandemic and a loss of much of our sense of normalcy. For mothers faced with the painful and public images of this racial trauma, it has certainly been gut-wrenching. Looking at one’s sons and daughters while wondering if the tragedy of race-related events could also affect them, is a weight no mother should have to bear. Yet, it has now become the reality for too many mothers…
Perusing social media pages, news channels or during conversations with fellow moms, it’s hard not to let fear, heartache and even anger, creep in. It’s also challenging, as working moms, to repress or even suppress these feelings, along with the inevitable associated trauma. It’s a trauma. Research shows each time a Black person is exposed to a killing of an unarmed Black person, its results in an additional 14 mental health days.
Learning to navigate racial trauma in the workplace as a working mom is a hard process, one that hits home more than anything else. Yet, it’s one that can also teach us to make more space for ourselves and others, and inspire positive change in companies and across society.
Here are a few ways to navigate racial trauma as a working mom in the workplace:
Check in with yourself
Sometimes, in the shuffle of our day-to-day activities, we may not give ourselves enough time or even permission to check in with ourselves. We may bury deep down the strong emotions and feelings experienced from racial trauma, not allowing ourselves to check in with ourselves. Taking some time to check in with the way we feel, through journaling or therapy for instance, can help.
Take some time to process traumatic experiences
Healing from trauma takes time. Yet, how often do we take time to process the painful images from racial discrimination or violence we may see on the news or on social media? How often do we truly allow ourselves to take a pause and grieve for the collective loss we’ve experienced? Not quite often enough…
Whether it’s taking a day off from work, or shutting off social media, taking time away to process racial trauma is not only necessary, it’s indispensable.
Find solace in affirming your culture
When racial trauma violates the boundaries of our identities, reclaiming and affirming our culture can bring much needed comfort and strength in times of crisis. Taking part in collective culture-affirming actions, or even re-committing to expressing our identities, can not only ease the pain, but also help in showing up more authentically at work.
Create and maintain healthy boundaries
As working moms, establishing healthy boundaries in and outside of the workplace can be difficult and go against our nurturing nature. However, it is so necessary in acknowledging and respecting our emotional, mental and physical capacity. In the aftermath of the recent racial crisis, many have committed or re-committed to diversity and inclusion efforts in the workplace. Yet, understanding the extent of our emotional, physical and mental bandwidth is crucial in helping us measure how much we can give of ourselves without completely depleting our precious resources and reserves.
Minimize code-switching
Code-switching is defined generally as an adjustment of one’s speech, appearance and/or behavior to bargain for better opportunities in exchange for making others more comfortable. While it may help increase the perception of professionalism for minorities, especially for Black people, and avoiding negative stereotypes, code-switching comes at a heavy cost. This cost includes social and psychological consequences, increasing the likelihood of more acute racial trauma.
Find safe spaces
Last but not least, finding safe spaces at work to process racial trauma is another way to effectively combat racial trauma. These safe spaces can take the form of Employee Resource Groups, Employee Assistance Programs, and/or diversity and inclusion trainings.
How do you navigate racial trauma in the workplace as a working mom?
As we hopefully near the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, the drastic changes it’s brought to the way we work, especially as working women and moms, are undeniable. From shifting the work dynamic for women and moms, resulting in countless job losses for women and the bulk of the pandemic “burden” on working moms faced with a childcare crisis and the majority of household chores, to negating decades of gender equity advances, its impact has been heavy to say the least. The “new” normal it’s created is pointing next to a hybrid post-COVID future for work.
According to a Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) survey, 55% of U.S. workers lean more towards a mixture of office and home work. While businesses are adjusting to the post-COVID world in different ways, from allowing employees to work remotely indefinitely to staggering their return to work, they’re also laying the foundation for an increasingly hybrid work future. For working mothers who have been dealing with a childcare crisis and a compounding of home and work responsibilities during the pandemic, this is a new adjustment that is certainly coming at a substantial cost. This is the cost of re-negotiating already precarious boundaries between work and home, solving the issue of childcare, and dealing with the mental load associated with it all.
While hybrid work arrangements may seem like the best of both worlds, with flexibility on one hand and socialization on the other, they represent yet another transition for working moms. Shifting from working from home to alternating between the office and the home requires not just a mental adjustment, but countless logistical changes that also come in play.
In my own experience, transitioning from working exclusively from home to a more hybrid schedule brought both a sense of relief at the prospect of more social time outside of the house; and also a sense of anxiety as to how to manage childcare, house duties and finding new ways to integrate this next normal. While it’s worked well so far, it hasn’t been without challenges, along with precious lessons in adaptability, flexibility and sheer human innovation.
If you’re ready to transition to a hybrid work environment as a working mom, here are 5 tips that can help:
Make the mental shift first
Most often, it’s not so much the physical, but the mental load that drives working mothers to exhaustion. As such, it’s crucial in any season of transition (which is pretty much the majority of time when you’re a working mom), to make the necessary mental shifts first.
Asking questions such as: “What is this new normal going to look like for me?”, “How do I feel about this change?”, “Why do I feel this way?”, or “What can I constructively do about this”, may seem unimportant at first. However, they are the catalysts of much needed exercises in self-regulation and self-assessment that are so important for working moms constantly having to think on their feet and respond to new situations on the go.
For me, it’s been a matter of rally taking the time to check in with myself to avoid feeling overwhelmed and making rash decisions. A simple time-out at the beginning or in the middle of the day can help, as can daily or frequent journaling and sharing with trusted friends.
Clarify and set clear expectations
Transitioning to a hybrid work environment also presents a set of new expectations. After a particularly traumatic pandemic year, these expectations may be quite different from pre-pandemic expectations. Hence, the importance of clarifying and setting clear expectations.
What hours and days will I be expected to be in the office? When at home, what is the expectation in terms of work hours? What does a more flexible schedule look like? What does a typical day look like? What norms of safety will be in place? There are examples of questions that can be part of the conversation to clarify expectations.
Define boundaries
Along with clarifying and setting expectations, defining boundaries is also paramount as the transition to a hybrid work environment involves a potential blurring of lines between work and home. As many, if not most working moms, found themselves lost in the shuffle of work and home during the pandemic, many more can also be disadvantaged by the lack of a clear line of professional and personal demarcation in a hybrid setting.
Am I expected to take calls at home after a certain time? Do I have to answer emails after-hours? On my days working from home, will I be expected to show up to the office in case of an urgent meeting or matter? These questions can serve as good examples of defining clearer boundaries in hybrid environments.
Discuss the ramifications for your career and your future career plans
Just as the concept of flexibility, while seemingly appearing to benefit working mothers, has actually added a layer of stigma to women’s career, a transition to a hybrid work setting can also have ramifications for women’s careers. As working mothers on flexible schedules have been in many instances stigmatized as less productive, working moms in hybrid work settings may also suffer from the same stigma.
One way to circumvent this stigma is to have a clear discussion and understanding of any possible ramifications for your career. Having an honest conversation with your manager can help alleviate these concerns, while opening the door to discuss the future of your career.
Would this hybrid schedule hurt my career? What are some new opportunities and challenges I can take advantage of? What would I have to do to reach the next level in my career? These questions can be asked in the course of a performance review as well as as part of a quick check-in with your management.
Adjust as you go
Last but not least, any transition requires a certain amount of experience and adjustment on-the-go. As you transition to a hybrid work setting, many of the moving pieces in your environment will also have to be re-calibrated. From adjusting your childcare schedule, to making new logistical arrangements and re-organizing your work priorities, some of the changes involved will not be perfectly aligned from the start.
Re-adjusting schedules, setting different expectations, and even considering a change in careers may come into play during this transition. Being flexible and adjusting as you go will go a long way towards reaching a better equilibrium.
How are you planning on transitioning to a hybrid work environment as a working mom?
