How to lose money if you’re a working woman? Have kids

Working women stand to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of their careers compared to their male counterparts.

The median salary gap between men and women is particularly dramatic in Washington state.

There are several complex factors driving this wedge between earning potential. The biggest one: motherhood.

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onia Dillane, a former senior software engineer at Amazon, chased her toddler around a north Seattle playground on a sunny morning in May.

Dillane left her job to spend the first 18 months with her daughter, but when it came time to consider child care, Dillane just couldn’t do it — even though she loved her job at Amazon.

“Every time, we would go and tour a daycare, I would just start crying,” she said.

Dillane discussed it with her husband, who also works for Amazon. They decided she would take a three-year break from her career to care for their daughter.

“It’s gonna be really interesting when I decide to go back,” she said. “Do I get to go back as a senior? Do I have to take a step back? I have a lot of impostor syndrome around that.”

Dillane knows that her salary could take a hit because of this time off.

She’s also aware that the ability to take a step back is a privilege many parents don’t have.

Still, her decision could have a significant impact on her lifetime earnings.

Each year out of workforce can cost 3 to 4 times a woman’s annual salary, according to the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.

That estimate combines the actual lost wages, lost salary growth over time, and lost retirement savings.

This is one way that becoming a mother contributes to the gender pay gap.

Some argue Dillane’s situation is not evidence of discrimination. It’s just the result of different choices and preferences.

That might be true if becoming a parent had the same impact on salaries for men and women. But men’s salaries tend to go up when they become fathers.

The median salary for fathers was 15% higher than mothers in 2022, according to Pew Research.

Fathers also earned more than women without children – a phenomenon sometimes referred to as the breadwinner bonus.

Linda Conway is a hardware engineering manager working for a semiconductor startup in Seattle. Although she doesn’t have kids herself, she saw at a previous company how bias can hold mothers back from opportunities.

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“I was in a room with a boss at one point and we were discussing projects to give different employees,” Conway said. “He said, ‘I don’t know about giving this one employee this project, because it could be a really big deal. And she has kids, she might need to go home at five when it needs to run late. I don’t know if we can count on her.’”

Conway said she was flabbergasted. It wasn’t an isolated incident.

Asked whether she’d ever seen a father passed over for opportunities, she said, “No, that was part of my frustration.”

Conway said she wouldn’t have been able to rise to the senior role she has now if she had children.

Bias is one reason mothers can end up in the salary slow lane. Another is the decisions women make in response to their outsized caregiving responsibilities at home. Mothers often self-sort into less demanding, and lower paying jobs because they need flexibility.

Take Dillane, the software engineer taking three years away from her career as a software engineer to care for her daughter.

After 21 months, she’s starting to miss work.

“My brain is craving a little bit more the problem solving, the interaction with adults,” Dillane said.

But she doesn’t want to miss out on this time with her child.

“I don't understand how we can't figure out something that would work for everyone, right?” she said. “Like how there can't be more flexibility where we can do a little a little more of both.”

That vision for a workforce that’s more supportive of new parents could become a reality, thanks to an unexpected cultural shift in recent years.

In many ways, the pandemic was brutal for mothers. But it has turned into a surprising equalizer for working women long-term.

As of March, more than 75% of mothers were participating in the labor force. That’s the highest percentage in years.

In surveys, mothers say the ability to work remotely is a game-changer, though many women don’t have that option.

As flexible work becomes more common, moms may not have to pay the same salary penalty they used to.

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he gender pay gap persists across all advanced industrialized countries, according to the World Economic Forum. Although no country has solved the gender pay gap, some are making progress.

Scandinavian nations are pushing public policies to support women at work and home.

For example, many countries give women caregiver credits to make up for lost retirement savings when they step out of the workforce.

At a minimum, places with smaller pay gaps have paid family leave and anti-discrimination laws.

There are efforts to bring some of those policies to the U.S.

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington made the case for her Paycheck Fairness Act in an interview with KUOW.

The law would require employers to prove they have legitimate reasons for pay discrepancies between men and women.

“We know there is a pay gap today,” Murray said. “We know it's hurting families; it's hurting our communities. It's hurting our economy. So the legislation federally is extremely important.”

Murray’s policy would also protect workers who discuss their salaries with each other and bolster their ability to sue for discrimination.

It’s hard to say how impactful any one of these policies is on its own. The data is limited.

There is a clear parallel between countries with narrower gender pay gaps and more robust policies supporting women.

Yet, Washington state still has one of the widest gaps in the country.

How could that be when Washington has implemented many of the policies popular in Europe? It’s one of the few states to mandate paid family leave. And Washington just passed a major salary transparency law.

But an important piece of the puzzle is missing. Washington doesn’t offer the kind of government-funded universal child care that makes it possible for women in other countries to stay in the workforce.

“They are the ones who end up having to quit their job because of child care,” Murray said. “The more we do to remove those barriers, and to support the care economy, as we call it, the more we will allow women to get into these high paying jobs, stay, and be competitive.”

The factors driving the gender pay gap are complex and deeply ingrained in our society.

We’re not attracting as many girls as boys to fields that will pay well down the line, like technology and mathematics.

Those that do pursue those subjects are often pushed out through bias and discrimination.

Women in the workforce face another big obstacle when they have kids.

Their salaries take a hit when they take time off to care for children.

And the extra caregiving responsibilities they have at home can mean they don’t pursue more demanding – and better paying – leadership roles.

There’s no one solution to these challenges. But that doesn’t mean they’re impossible to solve.

It just requires a set of solutions as broad and nuanced as the problem itself.