You know we all love a good story about mompreneurs, those smart women who climb their way from dirty diaper obscurity to millionaire status. They develop a product all moms need, they do some clever marketing and voila! They've made it to Oprah (and believe me, when my daughter was born, I looked down at her and thought, "You're gonna be my ticket to meeting Oprah").
Well, it turns out that the reality--at least for some moms--is a bit more dire. The Globe and Mail reported yesterday on some bummer numbers from Statistics Canada. "Highly educated women face a much more severe loss of earning power when they have children compared to mothers with less education," says the Globe. "Mothers who are highly educated earn less than childless women with similar degrees of education." How bad is the disparity? "At age 30, hourly earnings of mothers averaged $15.20 in 2004 compared to $18.10 for childless women."
The explanation from StatsCan is that the more highly educated you are, the more specialized your skills. Leaving the work force to go on mat leave means it's hard to catch up when you return to work.
But it could be just as likely that when you have kids, you just don't have the same opportunities to be a workaholic as you were when you were child-free. If your highly-educated self were working in a high-paying job, you would no longer be able to stay at work all hours--and this might force you to leave that lucrative position for something with lower pay, fewer benefits and more flexible hours.
Does that make you think twice about poking holes in the condoms? Or reaching for the Ph.D.?
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I agree with you to a point about not being able to keep the same hours, but I also think there is an argument to be said for women not being ‘willing’ to make those sacrifices ie. miss out on time with the kid to please the boss. When I read that article I thought that it was missing a big point: that a lot of highly educated women marry highly educated men who also have higher earning power, and thus as a couple they are better equipped (financially) to have one partner stay home completely, or to take a job with less pay/less responsibility to give the family a better work/life balance. So, perhaps these women are willingly making less so that they can spend more time with their families. Obviously, it’s not all as rosy as that, but it was not discussed at all in the article and I’m sure there are plenty of highly educated women out there who have made that choice.
I like to think that my high degree of education has afforded me a lot of choices in my life. And, yeah, I’m totally gonna be mompreneur of the year one of these days! You can come when I meet Oprah!!
Totes, Erika. Thanks for reminding us of the moms who actively choose to stay home and raise their kids and exit the work force. It reminds me of the brou-ha-ha that ensued a couple years ago when Brenda Barnes, the President of PepsiCo, quit to be with her kids (and actually, through the magic of Google, I just read that after 7 years of doing that, she joined Sara Lee as COO and then CEO–so that adds a new twist to the data, too).
And dude, I’m totally riding on your coattails to meet Oprah.
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