Can women overcome the motherhood penalty? - Diana Clement

The motherhood penalty can hold women back not just financially, but from future promotions too. Photo / 123RF

Diana Clement is a freelance journalist who has written a column for the Herald since 2004. Prior to that she was personal finance editor for the Sunday Business (now The Business) newspaper in London.

The “motherhood penalty” is a financial hit that women take when they have children and/or become stay-at-home parents.

It’s a financial penalty that doesn’t register with many men and childless people. Women, however, often take a huge financial and emotional hit. That is made worse if their relationships break down or if their partner dies or is forced to stop work for ill-health.

There are many reasons behind the motherhood penalty. Women’s financial literacy is lower than men’s. The gender pay gap is 8.6 per cent for all New Zealand women according to Manatū Wāhine Ministry for Women, and as much as 20 per cent for Māori and Pasifika. Women take more time off for parenting, and financial services products such as KiwiSaver aren’t always designed for us. With KiwiSaver, for example, women miss out on contributions if they take a break from work for parenting.

Just how insidious this motherhood penalty is, hit home for me when listening to speakers at the Te Ara Ahunga Ora Retirement Commission conference Shifting the Dial last month.

Emma Mclean, founder of Works for Everyone, a working parents consultancy, and the How to Smash Motherhood Penalty podcast says up to 60 per cent of a mother’s salary is penalised over 10 years if she has a child, and it never really recovers. “Fathers have a fatherhood bonus.” That’s because on average a father’s salary goes up once they become a parent.

Society makes it difficult for women to continue to work fulltime when they have children. A classic example is it’s almost guaranteed that the school phones the mother to pick up a sick child, even if, as one member of the audience said, the father is listed as the primary contact.

A speaker at the conference admitted leaving her jacket on her seat at work when heading off to pick up the children from daycare. She didn’t want it known that she left work at 4pm in case it affected her promotion chances, or she was at the head of the line for the next round of redundancies. It happens.

Shifting the dial on the motherhood penalty needs to start from the top. From the Government and employers. But what the conference really reminded me was that we as individual women can take action as well. Often it’s the conversations we don’t have with employers and partners that cost us financially.

Mclean says as women we need to speak up in the workplace and ask questions such as “where are the on site childcare solutions for parents? Where are the part-time senior jobs that enable you to build a career?” She works with women and encourages them to start a conversation around the fact they’re working four days a week, but delivering five days’ work, at a personal cost.

Women often don’t want to broach subjects such as parental leave policies when they’re at a job interview. It’s a problem that Stephanie Pow faced in the workplace, despite having an MBA from Wharton and holding strategic and operational roles at Vend. So she founded the Crayon website, which publishes parental leave policies from more than 260 New Zealand employers. That transparency helps create competition between those employers. It also means women don’t need to sneak around asking questions.

It’s not just the workplace, says Mclean. It’s what happens at home that matters. “Women have the memo that they can break into the business world. But men don’t have the memo that they can break into the home.”

Parents need to share the mental load such as when football practice is, if the broccoli in the fridge is still edible, who has the gold coin for mufti day, why can’t our 10-year-old read, or when is the science project due in? If women carry 100 per cent of this load they may be hampered in their career.

Share it by making the mental load visible, says Mclean. “It helps everyone else in your house to share stuff.” It also works two ways. Making space for dads to do the 4pm pickups, or take sick days when a child is ill, involves them more, she says.

“These are not easy conversations. But we actually have to ask the hard questions to change. So many of my clients say: ‘my job is really flexible, but my husband’s isn’t so it makes sense that I do all the work’. I get that. I’ve been in relationships like that. But if we keep having that as a narrative, and not leaning into the discomfort, nothing’s going to change.”