The Motherhood Penalty

In Which I Easily Solve This Apparently Intractable Problem

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Well, I spent a lot of hours yesterday meandering up and down the content production highways and byways of Bethel Church in Redding, California. Which is to say, I watched a really long video of Mike Winger on YouTube talking to someone named Elijah about how someone claiming to be a prophet made stuff up and destroyed his life. Then I watched a variety of reaction videos. Then I started listening to The Physics of Heaven, which I had on Audible already but was avoiding because it looked boring, and, indeed, that was a correct feeling.

I feel like I am peering through the curtains into the lighted windows somebody else’s appalling dysfunction, and as an Anglican, I am totally here for it. It is most interesting and I expect I will have another cucumber sandwich, shortly, and a glass of sherry while I gawk.

More about that later. As for today, I cannot pass over an item brought to my attention by a clever person over on X from the New York Times about the motherhood penalty. You must give it a listen, I implore you. Its only about 5 minutes long.

I have two thoughts. The first is that I feel so mad for these women, and indeed, all women today who are living in historically unparalleled material comfort in a society that has forgotten about the weightier, more pressing matters of the soul. Expecting something and not getting it is one of the most painful parts of being a human being. Women, as a class of people in the United States, have been cruelly promised one thing and are getting another and the depth of the disappointment is abyssal.

This misery is written in the faces of the women in this video, who dutifully went to college, went into the workforce, got married, had a child, and only then discovered that what they had been promised did not exist. Instead of happy, equal marriages replete with financial security, healthy children, respect, honor, and gainful employment, they earn much less money than expected, enjoy no social acclaim, and experience little happiness.

In the explanatory moment under the video, Jessica Grose writes that:

Technically, the motherhood penalty is the notion that when women become mothers, they earn less money and their wages tend to decrease with each child. When men become fathers, their wages increase, especially among the highest-earning men. That’s the “fatherhood premium.” Inflation over the past several years has made the motherhood penalty feel even more like a punishment.

While the motherhood penalty has been the term of art for what happens to working women when they become mothers, it does not encompass the financial hit taken by the stay-at-home parent. This financial burden isn’t just temporary, either — it stretches all the way to retirement.

Mothers have less money in personal retirement accounts, and they also receive less money from Social Security because they’re more likely to have gaps in their employment history, and their caregiving isn’t valued by society in the way that it should be. Which is to say, caregiving is neither paid nor truly respected.

The money, of course, is significant, but I rather think the respect piece is more excruciating. For anyone can suffer deprivations if she imagines other people will hold her in high esteem. When self-sacrifice was the social glue that bound communities together, women had a sense of place, of value, of meaning. And this was because, dare I say it? motherhood was once about self-sacrifice rather than self-fulfillment.

In the far distant past, being a good person was not acquired by money. Rather, the warmth of a world that cohered was the product of continual, self-forgetful labor on behalf of a husband, children, and hopefully, children’s children. In fact, one didn’t have to be a mother to have this posture in the world. Men also gave of themselves sacrificially in ways that built institutions and the world. How tragic that we have corporately walked away from something so basic to human happiness.

In the video, several of the women get to the heart of the matter:

I am so so angry that after all these years and everything that I have had to give up that I don’t have my own social security credits to qualify for retirement in my own name.

And also:

It put me totally financially dependent on my husband.

And again:

My stability should not be dependent on the strength of my marriage and my ability to resolve things in my marriage.

And again:

I have no job… I have to go through and rationalize my existence all the time just to myself. I’m more than just a mom.

And finally:

I had something to give, and I didn’t get to give it.

Jessica Grose points out that

Because child care has long been more expensive than a mortgage payment in most states, many women feel that their choices are constrained. They’re not always working because they want to, or staying home because they want to — they’re trying to complete a financial puzzle that has several pieces missing. Of course, many fathers feel this, too, but culturally, they’re pushed more into breadwinning than women tend to be (which may not be what makes them happiest, but it does make them more financially solvent).

Children, she admits, “are human beings” and should not be viewed as “a luxury good.” She says that “society’s disdain for mothers is effecting them emotionally, a kind of embodiment of the motherhood penalty.” What can be done? you might ask. There is only ever one solution on the table: “Affordable or subsidized child care would be a huge help.”

Which brings me to my second thought. I wish anyone would think about the children. I can’t believe I’m even saying this, because it’s so facile and obvious—or used to be until thirty years ago. But if you notice anything about the women in the video, other than the fact that they are all at least middle class and talking about careers rather than jobs, a distinction that makes a lot of difference, you hear only a little bit about the babies these women have had. They are “100% worth it” and also a huge inconvenience for those climbing the corporate ladder. It is impossible to feed them while at work. Nursing in a meeting is “a nightmare” and one women, having to take an hour of the day away from her desk to pump, meant that she was missing important connections with coworkers.

But imagine the day from the baby’s perspective. The most important thing for her is that she gets to be fed, held, changed, swaddled, and then the same all over again. And the most important person in her universe is the woman who carried her in her body and then brought her into the world. The connection between the mother and the child is so necessary, so precious if the whole world is to be set on its proper axis. When anything breaks that essential bond the pain goes to the core of both those people. When you do it at scale, as we have done, you have an ocean of pain that is impossible, in human terms, to measure.

It’s not a motherhood penalty. It is a society under some kind of spiritual curse. Subsidizing more childcare is not the solution. The solution is for mothers to discover that the brief years they spend with their children are more valuable to the whole course of human history than the money they earn. The solution is for fathers to be able to earn sufficient amounts of money to empower the mothers of their children to live lives that aren’t grueling and meaningless, but full of rich work that makes the happiness of the whole world go around.

The nice thing about the church—or at least the one I go to—is that we already know this. It actually isn’t about motherhood or fatherhood or anything like that. It’s about each person who walks in the door being valuable to Jesus and so valuable to us as a body. Every baby that babbles in the pew, every old man who bends over the prayer book, every poor person, every rich person, every woman who has to juggle work and children, every young person struggling to find his way in the world, the abandoned, the bereaved, the lonely, the full, the empty—each person counts.

There’s no money that can buy the turning of those individuals into Body of Christ through the work of the Spirit for the glory of the Father. Which is to say, the actual solution to the motherhood penalty is for people to discover the One who made them and why and the best way to find that out is in church.

So anyway, have a nice day!