Mothers, stop what you're doing right now – you are no longer being paid

Mothers, what are you doing today? Chairing board meetings, performing surgery, hosting interviews, greeting customers, making art, teaching? Well you might as well stop, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing. Because today is September 12th: from this point on, for the rest of the year, you’re working for free.

Shocking, isn’t it? If we’d known all our hard work was pointless, that the daily grind counting down to Christmas amounted to, well, zero, we might’ve taken the day off. The irony is, of course, we couldn’t afford to.

That we’ve reached the point where we can calculate Mums’ Equal Pay Day, as the campaign group Pregnant Then Screwed has done, is an outrage. It’s also nothing new. According to the Institute of Fiscal Studies, the pay gap between similarly-educated mothers and fathers widens over a period of 20 years after a mother returns to work, leading to a discrepancy of 30 per cent less per hour.

Mothers spend less time in paid work, and more time working part-time. And as a result, they miss out on earnings growth associated with more experience.

Ask any woman you know who’s returned to work after giving birth whether it was easy, and more than likely she’ll give you a hard stare. Not only do women miss out on promotion and career-enhancement opportunities while on maternity leave, but they’re expected to “snap back into shape” in a myriad different ways – physically, emotionally, professionally. Emotional labour can be just as hard as the physical, and it certainly doesn’t end when Statutory Maternity Pay runs out, either. For many women, having children means a lifetime of part-time work, juggling school drop-offs with conferences, team away days with calling in favours.

Of course, there are plenty of stay-at-home or flexible working dads who take on childcare responsibility, but the sad truth is that the “parent tax” disproportionately affects women in the workplace.

Young mothers – those who give birth before the age of 33 – are paid a whopping 15 per cent less than their childless peers, according to an analysis carried out for the Trades Union Congress (TUC) by the Institute for Public Policy Research in 2016. And one in nine mothers (11 per cent) report being dismissed, made redundant, or treated so poorly they felt they had to leave their job, according to the Equality and Human Rights Commission. That’s 54,000 competent and capable women wiped out of the British workforce, every single year.

My own experience is far from unique, but is perhaps haunting in its ubiquity. My full-time job in journalism, with the antisocial hours you’d expect, came to an end when I had my first child in 2012. I dropped to part-time, taking on graveyard shifts at this very newspaper (www.independent.co.uk) which began at 6am. When I had my second child two years ago, double school and nursery drop-offs made it impossible to continue as before. I swapped job stability for domestic duty and have been self-employed ever since.

So what’s really going on at work? Are women with children being deliberately discriminated against?

Some commentators put the pay discrepancy down to gender differences, claiming men are better negotiators; they bargain harder for higher pay. But Claudia Goldin, professor of economics at Harvard University, told the ‘Freakonomics’ podcast that it has far more to do with the pursuit of “temporal flexibility”. “Anything that leads you to want to have more time is going to be a large factor,” Goldin says.

She adds that women are not, except in some specific (and probably illegal) cases, getting paid less for doing the same work – they’re being paid less for doing different work because they are choosing jobs that afford more flexibility.

And why is that happening? Because that sense of duty – of caring for children or older parents – has, unfairly, become women’s work.

That’s why recognising Mums’ Equal Pay Day matters. Mothers are facing double penalty. Their position in the workplace, as “part-timers”, is being undervalued by employers while their hard labour or care work is ignored by our wider economy. We may have extra time, as Goldin points out, but we are not spending it away from ‘work’.