Mothers aren't only experts at making the best PB&J sandwiches. They also know how to bring home the bacon despite the occasional obstacle, such as childbirth.
Generations of working mothers have learned how to stay professionally relevant and avoid income shocks despite the résumé gaps that can come along with a new baby. With millions of jobs lost since the recession began, and fierce competition for open spots, mothers may be in a great position to offer some needed advice.
Looking for tips, I turned to a mother whom I know and love well: my own mom, Nancy Mantell, an economist and mother of three.
When my mother was seven months' pregnant with me, she was fired, possibly because she was pregnant (her boss never gave her a concrete explanation). To stay professionally productive, my mother networked, and found some short-term contract work.
"I got a new job that I had until a couple of weeks before you were born," she told me. "I had no interest in having all of the last two months off. I had the ability to work and I had no reason not to. My life was set up around me working."
It turns out that my mother was onto something.
Work contracts with flexible hours have at least a couple of advantages , said Maria Goldsholl, chief operating officer of Mom Corps, an Atlanta-based staffing firm that specializes in flexible employment.
For one, workers are also able to do something else, such as look for a full-time job or go to school. And two, workers may be able to enter new industries, thereby diversifying their experience.
"I tell stay-at-home moms that you need to keep your toe in the workforce," Goldsholl said. "These contracts help you stay relevant, stay current, so your economic power when you decide to go back full-time to the workforce is still there, and your ability to command a similar salary to what you had before is still there."
Workers also should be flexible, she said "Along with diversifying your background, be flexible about what you think is the right opportunity," she said. "Volunteer on a board, or be on a steering committee. You are exposed to making decisions, and making new connections, and possibly even figuring out a new career for yourself."
He-cession
Working moms know how important it is to keep up professional productivity while taking time off.
In general, a hole in your résumé can negatively affect lifetime earnings, some economists say. Such a gap "tends to dog you your entire life," said James Galbraith, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin.
Men in particular are going to have gaps in their résumés because of the "he-cession." Due to downturns in industries such as construction and manufacturing, the majority of the 8.4 million jobs lost since the recession began were held by men. As of February, the unemployment rate for adult men, those aged 20 years and older, reached 10%, compared with 8% for adult women. Read the government's employment data (PDF).
It will be interesting to see whether over the long term men and women suffer to the same extent from holes in their résumés caused by the recession. Women already earn less than men on average. In 2009, median weekly earnings for women were $657, compared with $819 for men, resulting in a female-to-male-earnings ratio of 80.2%, according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research.
"There's pretty compelling evidence in my mind that there is an element of discrimination," economist Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and professor at Columbia University, recently told me.
However, he added, there are other factors behind the pay gap, and an increasingly large fraction of women don't feel these concerns. If the earnings gap is due to less accumulated work experience, then unemployed men and women workers may be in for a lifetime of aftershocks from the recession.
source: marketwatch
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