(Bloomberg Opinion) -- This may not be the happiest Mother’s Day for working moms. As families still shelter in their homes to protect themselves from Covid-19, a lot of moms are, as usual, doing more than their fair share of child care while (impossibly) trying to teach out-of-school kids and work remotely. And moms like me who are doing this are, of course, among the lucky ones — we haven’t lost our incomes. But there’s something fairly easy and cost-free that employers can do to attract, support and retain working mothers, during and after this pandemic: Offer us predictable hours and work commitments.
Unpredictability is one of the biggest challenges working moms face — in all kinds of professions. It helps explain why highly educated mothers on the whole don’t earn more and go further in their careers. Between 1984 and 2014, the hourly pay of people who work long hours increased dramatically, according to research by the Russell Sage Foundation. Top-paying jobs in fields like finance, consulting and law often require long and unpredictable hours, so it’s hard for two people in the same family to hold such positions. If both parents have to jump on last-minute flights, who will be home for the kids? That sort of responsibility still mostly falls to mothers, which helps explain why many highly educated moms don’t hold top positions.
The Russell Sage study also found that the long hours that now come with top-paying jobs helps explain the so-called motherhood wage penalty and fatherhood wage premium — the reason moms make less money than childless women and dads make more money than childless men. According to a 2018 study of Census data by the National Women’s Law Center, the motherhood penalty costs the average mom $16,000 a year in lost wages.
Clearly many things need to change, including employer expectations of the number of hours an individual worker can reasonably put in. However, a big part of the solution is predictability. If moms could schedule their hours and line up child care in advance, they’d be better able to juggle parenthood and higher-paying jobs. Of course, some positions have a higher inherent level of uncertainty: A partner in a law firm would be expected to be available to talk to a top client at any time. But an easy, inexpensive thing employers can do to make managing parenthood and jobs much, much more manageable — for all parents — would be to schedule meetings and trips with as much notice as possible.
Take my family. My husband is an emergency medicine physician and I’m a professor. My husband often works nights and weekends and is required to put in his requests for particular shifts off several weeks in advance. This means that it’s no problem for me to arrange for him to be home for our young daughter so that I can be at in-person meetings or travel for research and conferences — if I know about my commitments well in advance. The problems arise when my meetings are scheduled without a few weeks’ notice and he is already scheduled to work at the same time. Even parents who are working from home while quarantining need advance notice so that one parent can be present to keep an eye on the kids while the other is in a meeting. This week, for example, I was sent a Doodle poll after 9 p.m. with nine possible times for an upcoming meeting, including one slot at 9 a.m. the next morning. It’s not reasonable for most parents to be expected to secure child care on such short notice.