Every year around Mother’s Day, Salary.com comes out with a report that purports to calculate what a mother’s work is worth (in dollars). This year was no exception, as Meredith Hanrahan of Salary.com wrote in an article entitled “Six-Figure Moms” …
“While it is impossible to put a price tag on the value of a mom, it is possible to quantify what she would earn if an employer had to pay someone to do the multiple jobs an average mom performs in a given week including overtime. This year, Salary.com determined that the time mothers spend performing the 10 most popular “Mom job functions” would equate to an annual cash compensation of $116,805 for Stay-At-Home Mom’s and $68,405 for Working Moms.”
And last year those figures were even higher (at $138,094 for Stay-At-Home Moms and $85,938 for Working Moms)!
The fact is that it’s easy to poke holes through the logic here.
“…
the designers of the formula this year realized that keeping track of a house and a child or two was not quite identical to running a major corporation
…”
For example, the study assumes that mothers spend 4.2 hours per week performing a “CEO role” and that this time therefore is worth what a CEO would be paid on an hourly basis. If fact, that’s why the dollar amounts got smaller this year … the designers of the formula this year realized that keeping track of a house and a child or two was not quite identical to running a major corporation, so they changed the comparison to what a CEO of a smaller corporation might earn (prorated to a “per hour” basis).
Which of course is ludicrous … there are 82.5 million mothers in America (based in a Census Department report in 2005) but far fewer CEO positions. For example, Wal-Mart has 1.4 million employees in the U.S. and 2.1 million employees worldwide (but only one CEO), so the logic of assuming that 100% of mothers are working as skillfully and valuably as an actual CEO requires a huge stretch in credulity.
It’s not easy
getting to the top
And it takes 20 or 30 years of butt-kissing, shafting people, cutting corners and just plain luck to eventually become CEO … and by that time, a mother’s kids would have long since grown up. You don’t get a CEO-level paycheck from your first year of employment.
And what portion of U.S. mothers have graduated from top business schools (like Harvard or Stanford)? A whole lot fewer than 82.5 million, I’ll wager. It takes exceptional qualifications these days to be considered “CEO material”.
The fact is that very few workers ever get even remotely close to becoming CEO, so imputing that level of value to the average mother’s performance is nonsensical.
Also, much of the imputed income comes from assuming large amounts of overtime (the study doesn’t mention whether those “overtime” hours are computed as “straight time” or at “time-and-a-half”). For working mothers, 17 hours of weekly overtime is presumed and for stay-at-home mothers, 56 hours of weekly overtime is presumed.
And that’s where
the article contradicts itself
But for CEO roles (and for that matter any other managerial level role) in the real world, there is no overtime pay. Under labor laws, managerial employees are considered “exempt” employees. They’re expected to work as long as it takes to “get the job done” in return for their base pay.
If you do the math, the imputed annual “income” equivalent in the study would work out to a total of $5.9 trillion dollars (or just over 50% of total GDP) based on 2005 figures.
Who would pay this? Unless “American mothers” is spelled “W-a-l-l S-t-r-e-e-t”, then certainly not the government. Which stands to reason … “American mothers” don’t show up prominently in the list of the major donors to political candidates each election season.
And as Chester L. Karrass observes: “In Business As in Life - You Don’t Get What You Deserve, You Get What You Negotiate”. So if women are willing to be mothers on a “pro bono” basis, then that’s how they’ll be compensated for it … not at all.
And what about fathers?
Presumably they must have an even more difficult role than mothers, as why else would so many men “abandon their family” (if you believe the spin that ex-wives adopt after booting hubby to the curb) and that men seem much more reluctant than women to marry or start a family? You won’t hear many men fretting vocally about ticking time clocks or women’s fear of commitment.
What would a father’s “imputed value” be? The hardest part of that role for me was always the “dealing with mother” part (the “husband” part of the role). If, for example, psychiatrists charge $200 per hour for emotional therapy, empathetic listening, crisis interventions and such, I’m sure I averaged at least four hours a day in my marriages (equivalent to $292,000 in imputed value each year) calming down a frequently hyper-emotional wife.
Compared to that, the kids were a joy (I’d have done that part for free … and I did).
But all in all, I’d not take the numbers here too seriously.
Stay tuned,
-Mack Doppler
