Challenging Discrimination against Moms

By Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)

“Moms earn up to 14 percent less than women who don’t have children, says a University of New Mexico study.” “Getting pregnant can mean losing your job.” “The devaluation of mothers is at a crisis point in our nation.” These are all excerpts from recent articles about working mothers and while it’s clear why sentences like these are troubling, one fact really brings it home: in 2010, women represented 46.7 percent of the United States labor force and 80 percent of women in our nation have children by the time they’re 44 years-old, which means a majority of women in the U.S. experience mom discrimination at some point in their lives.

Conversations regarding working mothers should be productive and the goal should be to provide new insights, which is why it seems important to shed light on a newly emerging aspect of the mommy wars that appears to be on the rise: senior women with grown children who have little to no patience for younger mothers trying to come up the ranks while raising their young children. According to Tobi Kosake, the reasoning seems to be, “If I didn’t have it easy, why should you?”

Female Managers & Hostile Work Environments

Kosake was a high-ranking woman working for a major player in the petroleum industry when she gave birth to her special needs daughter. Her male managers were incredibly supportive when she began working from home in order to care for her child, even requesting photos of her work setup to hopefully serve as a template one day for others working from home. It was the best of both worlds: Kosake was able to spend time with her daughter and continue working at a job she loved, but all of this changed the moment another manager was hired.

“The new manager was a woman and a mother and I was certain she’d support me, but the first day at work she went to the team and told them she wanted me back in the office immediately. Hell followed,” Kosake said.

And it truly was hell. When Kosake refused to go back to the office her new manager wouldn’t let up and the issue eventually got taken to court, but Kosake’s pockets weren’t as deep as the company’s and she didn’t want the aggravation, so she left her job behind.

Kosake says that this particular female manager was known for being overly aggressive, offensive, and was actually rated low as a manager, but some of the issues she ran into with this woman weren’t specific to her.

“My friends and I, both in this industry and out, have talked about it and it seems that senior female managers feel as if they have to be harder on everyone to prove themselves. The thing is, they’re also harder on other women – not to see us excel, but because they don’t want to be seen as a female manager who allows other women flexibility,” Kosake said. “It creates a hostile work environment. My former manager told me that she breast fed for 18 months and no one did her any favors or cut her any breaks, so why should she let me continue working from home? When I told her that my daughter was special needs, she told me that it wasn’t up for negotiation. Obviously, these aren’t optimal working conditions, especially for those of us who want to have families and if women leave because of this reason, there’s going to be major problems.”

Problems on the Horizon

And Kosake’s right. According to the 47-year-old, when she started out in the petroleum industry 20 years ago many women were leaving because there was no flexibility. Now that the industry provides more flexible work options, there’s a generation of young women coming in and a generation of women leaving for retirement.

“Industries need women my age to train the women coming in, to transfer our knowledge, but who’s going to train them if we go? What will happen if women my age leave because of the treatment they’re receiving from more senior women? There’s going to be no one to train young women on one side and no one to hand work off to on the other side,” Kosake said.

According to Kosake, the traditional “mommy wars” (as they’ve come to be known) aren’t what’s troubling working moms these days; it’s the resistance they experience from senior women who, for a lack of a better word, seem bitter about the flexibility they didn’t have when they were raising their children.

“Senior women who had children when they were younger sacrificed their family life to be successful. We need flexibility and it’s not like they don’t understand it because they needed flexibility too. It’s more like, ‘I had to make sacrifices, why don’t you? I did just fine, why should I make things easier for you?’ It sometimes feels like there’s no sisterhood in the workforce,” Kosake said.

Creating Change

So what’s to be done, not just about the issue of flexibility, but the uncomfortable tension between senior women and working mothers with children? Very few companies need to be convinced of the benefits of flexible work options, not just for working moms, but for working parents in general. There seems to be a basic understanding of the business case for workplace flexibility, but the problem seems to be implementing the policy. As Kosake pointed out, very few workplaces have clear guidelines regarding flexibility written into their policies and at best, their policy simply says that flexible work options can be provided at the discretion of your manager – which is the exact issue Kosake had with her manager.

The second issue – the tensions between senior women with grown children and working moms – is more difficult to solve; Kosake seems to be on to something, however. Women in the workplace frequently have to combat sexist opinions and attitudes that are based on little more than their gender and, in these environments, it seems likely that those same women will begin to push back against certain female-identified characteristics. Even further, they may push against other women to separate themselves and not be seen as sympathetic to issues traditionally framed as “women’s issues,” such as workplace flexibility and work/life balance.

In other words, a workplace environment where women feel as if they have to behave as men isn’t a good work environment. This problem speaks to cultural issues, as well. It’s no wonder why women who had to make difficult choices to launch their careers would see expect the same from younger working moms, but that doesn’t make it right.

“When you boil it down, there’s no such thing as a supermom,” Kosake said. “Some of us can pretend that we don’t need help and others can pretend that they were okay without help, but it’s never true. As a woman, every choice you make has major repercussions, and choosing to be a mother is no exception. When you’re a working woman who chooses to have a child, it has major repercussions. You have to do what’s right for you and not force your belief system on other women who chose a different path or have a different set of needs.”