We Act as if It's Optional for Women to Work. It's Not.

Today is the 23rd anniversary of the Family and Medical Leave Act.  This momentous piece of legislation that provides 12 weeks of unpaid leave has been used over 200 million times by Americans.  But it has huge shortcomings.  As Vicki Shabo, Vice President at the National Partnership for Women & Families points out, 40% of the U.S. workforce isn’t covered by the law and millions more can’t make use of it because they can’t afford to go without pay.

In the Washington Post today, I wrote about the kinds of false assumptions that would need to exist to explain the fact that the United States is the only developed economy in the world that does not have paid maternity leave.  THE ONLY ONE.  One of biggest false assumptions is that it’s optional for women to work. 

This couldn’t be further from the truth. Today, 70 percent of mothers work.  And almost two thirds of mothers are either the primary breadwinner or co-breadwinner for their family. And economists credit women entering the workforce with slowing the financial decline of middle-class families.  If women hadn’t gone to work, many more families would have sunk altogether.  Women’s pay checks have at least enabled their families to tread water. 

As women continue to step into the role of economic provider for their families, there are troubling trends about the financial prospects for women at the lower rungs of the class ladder.  Recent analysis by the Shriver Report found that one in three adult women in the U.S. lives in or on the brink of poverty.  That works out to be forty two million women who are the mothers of twenty eight million children.  This group of women is concentrated in low-wage work.  Overall, women hold two-thirds of the nearly twenty million low-wage jobs.  About half of low-income, working mothers are employed in the retail or service sector where pay is low, benefits like sick days are non-existent, and jobs are insecure. 

So how have we as a country responded to the changes regarding women, work, and declines in family’s economic well-being?  By doing pretty much nothing.  As I write in the Washington Post, it’s not that we can’t respond with policies that reflect the reality that working is a necessity for women.  It’s that we won’t. 

The results are terrible.  Parents are forced to make impossible choices between showing up at work to keep their job and staying home with a sick child.  Families experience economic hardship upon the birth of a child because they are out of work for some time.  And parents have to leave their children at low quality day cares because it’s the only affordable option available.  Yet here’s one mother’s description of what happened to her son: “There’s times that my dad would actually pick [my son] up from day care and he would have vomit down his clothes….He had diaper rashes so bad that, oh my God, it looked like somebody actually stabbed him.”

It’s time for us to implement policies and practices like paid family and medical leave and affordable, high-quality child care that reflect the world as it is, not the world as it isn’t. 

For more on this read my OpEd, We Act as if It’s Optional for Women to Work.  It’s Not.

Follow Marianne on Twitter @Coopermarianne and like her on Facebook For more on how families are coping in an uncertain age see Marianne’s book Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times.