SAHM vs WOHM? 'Choice' Would Be a Fine Thing

This barf-inducing letter from a working mom to a stay-at-home mom was doing the rounds of social media recently. Some choice quotes:

"Dear Stay at Home Mom
Some people have been questioning what you do at home all day... I admire your infinite patience, your ability to face each day cheerfully and bring joy into your children's life even when they wear you down..."

and

"Dear Working Mom...
I know that when you are at work you don't waste a single minute. I know you eat lunch at your desk, you don't go out for coffee and you show complete dedication and concentration to your job..."

Of course. Motherhood is martyrdom, no matter what kind of mother you are!

As the currently non-earning-on-a-kind-of-sabbatical-and-parenting (the phrase 'stay-at-home-mom' gives me the dry heaves) member of our household, obviously I have a lot of time on my hands to while away on Twitter and Facebook, getting annoyed about things.

Life as a CNEOAKOSP person is actually pretty sweet. When I'm not sipping a grande half-fat decaf vanilla latte in Starbucks or working out in pilates class clad head-to-toe in Lulu Lemon, I spend my time judging working parents, sneering at their daycare-raised spawn and admiring my martyr-like countenance in the mirror.

It's not that I think I'm perfect. I just know that I personally made better choices for me and my family, you see. And I don't need to earn money for holidays and cars because I'll get my reward in heaven. Wherever heaven for atheists might be (Richard Dawkins' living room?).

Seriously though, why do we have to label each other as SAHMs or WOHMs or even CNEOAKOSPs? These days it's pretty rare for anyone to be either a working or stay-at-home parent completely. The role of 'housewife', outside of reality TV, is largely a thing of the past.

Most parents only go down the stay-at-home route for a few short years while their children are babies or in preschool, at most. Many working parents will take career breaks from time to time, if they can afford to, or will switch to part-time hours or opt to work from home, if they can, too.

A whole host of women who call themselves SAHMs are in fact community volunteers, writers, bloggers, activists and educators who just happen to not have much of a pay check to go with the work that they do.

So why assume that WOHMs or SAHMs are some kind of species coming from different planets who need to reach out to one another or who judge one another for their choices?

'Choice' is a misleading word anyway. As parents, we are operating within a pretty limited range of choices to begin with. Most of the non-earning parents that I know are out of the workplace for practical reasons. Childcare is too expensive or their former employer didn't support flexible hours or they moved to support their spouse's career and haven't been able to maintain their own or whatever. 

Very few SAHMs that I know have made their decision for ideological reasons, out of some activist 'choice'. The few that did and that emphatically say they want to be hands-on for their children's early years are usually teachers or social workers by profession and so have a professional interest in child development already.

Mostly though, it's just about the practicalities of life. Working mothers run the gamut from high-powered executives with full-time nannies to struggling single parents working two jobs on minimum wage and leaving their kids with relatives to make ends meet.

Stay-at-home mothers run the gamut from high-powered corporate wives with live-in nannies and endless charity lunch dates to women in low-income households cutting coupons and trying to stretch a tiny income because their own income doesn't cover childcare.

I've seen all sides of the debate and only a tiny number of people I know are working because of some feminist ideology or staying home because of some conservative ideology. So why stick labels on one another? It would be much more productive to have a discussion about why choices for parents are so limited in the first place.

Are Female Employees More Costly and Troublesome Than Others?

Another day, another CEO being chewed out for clumsy comments. This time it is Tim Armstrong of AOL who ignored his PR person and ad-libbed on an agreed company statement. In speaking about AOL's plan to cut 401(k) benefits for employees, Armstrong lamented the high cost of staff benefits to AOL. 

His example of those high costs? Saving the lives of distressed babies born to AOL colleagues at a cost of about a million dollars each. 

 


Ouch.

Needless to say, he was condemned for his callousness across the media. He later made a kind of non-apology apology for his comments and decided to not cut staff benefits at AOL after all.

What's interesting to me here is how Armstrong's comments reflect a common prejudice among business owners and bosses that I have encountered. When thinking about expensive staff benefits, the first thing that he chose to highlight was 'high-risk pregnancy' and 'distressed babies'. Would he have dared to mention the high cost of treating a staff member's multiple sclerosis or kidney transplant? Would he have dared to point out the high cost of remodeling an office to accommodate a staff member in a wheelchair? 

This is a growing trend now in business that portrays women and their 'choices' (that they make in a vacuum without their partners, it seems) as high-cost and burdensome. From Fox News anchors lamenting that women take up too much of their 'fair share' of healthcare to businesses panicking about the prospect of a federally mandated paid family leave, employers are encouraged to view women as particularly high-cost and troublesome employees.

This kind of mindset has real-world consequences. Slate journalist, Dana Goldstein, uncovered a story relating to Armstrong's time at Google when a senior salesperson was demoted as a result of complications arising from her 'high-risk pregnancy' (that dreaded burden on corporate America!).  Her pregnancy did not actually impact on her job apart from an inability to travel for a few months but it seems as though Armstrong panicked at the mere mention of a staff member's high-risk pregnancy and took drastic measures. She took a case against Google for pregnancy discrimination that was settled in arbitration. 

Preconceptions about women, pregnancy, and childcare commitments are what lead to employers shunning women of child-bearing age. When businesses want to complain about the burden of administration or healthcare, it's always women-specific benefits that are wheeled out as an example of burdensome spending.

Of all the benefits that corporations offer to their staff, those relating to the cost of childbearing and child-rearing seem the most resented. And yet while few of us in life will experience serious disability or illness that affects our ability to work, over 80% of Americans are parents. 

There is a subtle sexism in play here. While anyone can get cancer or be in a car accident, only women get pregnant and bear children. By highlighting this kind of female-specific cost, as Armstrong did, CEOs seem to believe they can divide and conquer their employees.

Yet the woman in question, as she explains in this article, was not actually an AOL employee. The health benefit came via her husband who was employed as an editor by AOL. So despite all the talk about the burden of female employees, businessmen would do well to remember that whenever they discriminate against a woman who is bearing a child, that child has a father. 

Fathers care just as much about the well-being of their children as mothers and a callous attitude from CEOs affects them as much as it affects women. If I were a man, I would not want to work for a company that talks about a 'distressed baby' as a cost to their bottom line. Again, more than 80% of us are parents. 

Balancing employee benefits and company profits is a reasonable thing for a corporate CEO to want to do. Trying to pin the blame for excessive costs of those benefits on women and babies is not the way to do it, however.