Children Benefit from Working Mothers

Women in the workforce have always faced the challenge of choosing between a professional life and family obligations. Although it has become more of the norm for women to seek out full-time professional work, there is still a bias regarding working mothers. According to one study done by the Pew Center, “41 percent of adults say the increase in working mothers is bad for society, while just 22 percent say it is good.”

In an interview with Fortune Magazine, Terri McCullough, director of the No Ceilings Report said, “There are cultural norms that really challenge women.” The No Ceilings Report was released earlier this year in conjunction with the Gates and Clinton Foundations. The No Ceilings Report accumulates data from a multitude of research and measures the progress of women globally since 1995.

These cultural norms that challenge women include the idea that women neglect their children when they are involved in full-time positions. However, a recent study has shown that children who have mothers that work outside of the home, “are more likely to have jobs themselves, are more likely to hold supervisory responsibility at those jobs, and earn higher wages than women whose mothers stayed home full time.”

This study, completed by Professor Kathleen L. McGinn, the Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School together with Mayra Ruiz Castro, a researcher at HBS, and Elizabeth Long Lingo of Mt. Holyoke College, shows that children really benefit from having working mothers, instead of being neglected, as the social norm would lead society to believe. The study showed that, “while being raised by a working mother had no apparent effect on men’s relative wages, women raised by working moms had higher incomes than women whose moms stayed at home full time.” The study was part of Harvard’s new Gender Initiative, featured in this article on MetroMBA last month.

This is a positive movement for women in the workforce. Breaking down the barriers for women in the workforce starts with overturning the bias that women face while deciding to continue or to advance their careers as mothers or considering to become mothers, is the first step in attaining equality for women in business. According to the Pew Center, women now make up 5 percent of CEOs in the country’s Fortune 500 companies, 17 percent of the corporate board members among Fortune 500 companies. There are now 104 women who serve as members of Congress, according to the Pew Center.

It is not only the daughters of working mothers who benefit. Another study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics shows that men who are brought up in a family where the mother worked are more likely to marry a woman who works and be supportive of her continuing to work after having children. The study states that this increase in support from men, “has been a significant factor in the increase in female labor force participation over time.”

In the Harvard study, McGinn comments, “There’s a lot of parental guilt about having both parents working outside the home, but what this research says to us is that not only are you helping your family economically, and helping yourself professionally and emotionally if you have a job you love, but you’re also helping your kids.”

Choosing to continue to work after becoming a mother is not the only work-family issue that women face. Choosing to advance their career through continuing education, whether it is completing the MBA or an Executive MBA program, can also be a hard decision for women to make. Taking time away from children to work is already a difficult decision, but adding advanced educational commitments to a busy work-family life makes educational advancement even harder for women.

Luckily, more women are seeing support while completing MBA programs. In May, MetroMBA published a previous article about the increase in women completing MBA programs and how new programs, scheduling options and an increase in online MBA programs has helped with the increase in women with MBAs. The previous article referred to an interview of Dana Brown, the director of the MBA program at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School, in the Financial Times.

In this interview, Brown stated that it was important to have women in the MBA programs because it helps to add a new perspective to course work and will open the eyes of students who do not have the perspective of being a parent. “Mothers add unique value to the MBA, and serve as role models for both male and female peers, many of whom will at some point confront the challenge of balancing their career and parental responsibilities,” she said.

It is hopeful that with continuing research, like the Harvard study and other support that women receive in the work force, as well as the increase of women choosing to continue their education, that equality in the workforce can be achieved.

 

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