The long march of American mothers into the workplace has ground to a halt. And the reason will come as no surprise to the millions of women now trying to balance kids and a job: It’s just getting too tough to pull off.
The numbers are complicated by the swings of the U.S. economy. But the trend is clear: The labor force participation of women with children, which peaked in 1997 after rising steadily for generations, has stayed flat or even declined in the last decade.
The issue goes beyond simple economic indicators such as productivity gains. America, on the whole, has become an increasingly hostile environment for raising children, at least from an economic standpoint.
Though the price of big-screen TVs has come down, much of the population struggles to afford the fundamentals that a family needs to thrive — namely a safe home in a high-quality school district, child care, health services and transportation, among other basics.
At the same time, many employers have grown stingier, typically requiring long hours while offering little flexibility, job security or fringe benefits. With dad busy at work as well, or not in the picture at all, mom bears the brunt of the squeeze.
Consider Angie Johnson, a medical-billing clerk in Peoria who encountered a common pitfall of working motherhood when she went on pregnancy bed rest in 2004. Without maternity leave, no work meant no paycheck.
Then her son was born with a heart condition, and Johnson found herself swamped with caregiver responsibilities. She tried working part time, but “employers don’t want people missing every other week,” she said.
Though her husband held a decent job as a welder, the family had to retrench. They sold a car, stopped dining out and started shopping secondhand. They canceled the cable TV and Internet access, and ate more hot dogs instead of costlier fruits and vegetables. The bills mounted. Finally, after more than a year, Johnson landed an office job with her son’s cardiologist.
She’s not looking for sympathy. Yet Johnson’s circumstances illustrate the difficulties that can make every day a challenge for working moms. “We got through it,” she said. “But it would have been nice if I had an employer who could have helped me out.”
Such employers are rare, which helps explain the numbers. According to the latest figures from the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the proportion of women with school-age kids who held a job in 2006 was 75 percent, down 2 percentage points since 1997. The decline was more pronounced among married women with younger children.
And 2006 was no blip. For the first time since the late 1940s, the percentage of mothers juggling a job along with everything else has gone down and stayed down for years.
The truth is, if the women involved had their druthers, that figure probably would go down some more.
Undoubtedly, a full-time job can be rewarding in many ways, and that is an important draw for women in the workplace. It also can be crucial for future self-sufficiency. With men’s wages stagnating, a woman’s job may be the only practical means for most families to move up the economic food chain and afford such ever-more-expensive luxuries as college educations.
But just try it while wrangling a herd of kids.
A recent phone survey of 2,020 adults by the independent Pew Research Center reflects the shift in sentiment. Only one in five working moms with children 17 and younger believes a full-time job is ideal for her, down from one in three a decade ago. Almost 20 percent would rather not work at all. And fully 60 percent wish they could work part time, up dramatically from the survey results in 1997.
The reality is different, of course. Less than one-quarter of all working mothers actually hold part-time jobs.
The survey doesn’t address why the full-timers long to cut back, but here’s a hint: They were the least likely to give themselves high ratings as parents.
This familiar tale often is told from the standpoint of high rollers. The classic case is Brenda Barnes, who famously quit her job as a leading executive at Pepsi to care for her kids, then years later returned in glory to the top of Sara Lee Corp., the Chicago-area consumer-products giant. (See a profile of Barnes in today’s Chicago Tribune Magazine.) Barnes and other high achievers remain the exception, though they serve as role models and their influence shapes workplace policies.
Some enlightened employers eager to retain their hard-to-replace personnel are trying creative new approaches. At American Express, for instance, employees enjoy flexible programs aimed at easing their transition back into the office after generous time off for family leave.
In practice, leading-edge perks rarely trickle down to those laboring in the call centers, restaurant kitchens, retail sales floors and similar work sites. Pressure to drive down wages and cut benefits has led employers to accept high turnover as a cost of doing business among workers with skills considered easy to replace.
Anne Ladky, executive director of the non-profit advocacy group Women Employed, focuses on the millions of working women who make less than $25,000 a year and typically don’t even qualify for paid sick leave. “The biggest challenge to women’s economic advancement today is their concentration in low-wage, low-opportunity jobs,” she says. “There really is no such thing as leave for women earning low incomes. They really have to quit.”
Keep those women in mind in the years to come if the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that mothers with young children are heading off to work in record numbers again. That revival of the long-term trend probably would reflect economic hardship rather than growing opportunities for personal career development.
So if it happens, save the applause. A lot of those working mothers won’t be clapping.
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gburns@tribune.com
