Letters to the Editor

• 25%?

  [Read the article: Clearing up "opting out"]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  While I agree with bad_feminist on most of her points -- ie, that being responsible for child care in general is driving women's lifetime wages down -- I quibble with her math. 4 years is 25% of your working life? Only if you plan to retire at age 40 and didn't start until you were 24. 4 years is 25% of 16.

  I entered the workforce at age 18, though only for summer and temp jobs, until I got my first career job at 23. If I work until I'm 65, I will spend 42 years in the workforce. I have, thus far, taken 2 full years off to raise a baby and run a home business, but if we ignore the home business, that would be 5% of my likely work life. 4 years would be 10%. In order to lose 25% of my work years to child rearing I would need to take 10 years out, and the data quoted in this article does not support that.

  One of the problems feminism currently faces is that women, in fact, do *not* lose that much time to child rearing... according to the data in this study, anyway... but the perception that they *do*, reflected in mommy tracks and things like that, cause them to lose much more money over time than the actual lost work time would indicate. I am perfectly comfortable with the idea that I will lose 5% of the Social Security I'd have otherwise made in exchange for raising my baby -- that is fair, that is time I really didn't work. (Well, I did, but we're ignoring the home business.) But if the fact that I took 2 years off for a baby leaves me to be ignored and ghettoized into mommy tracks and passed over for promotions when I do return to the workforce, and as a result I lose 25% of my lifetime wages to a time loss that was actually only 5% of my working life, *that* is a serious inequality that feminism needs to address.

  It's perfectly fair to not make money for time you didn't work, but it's totally unfair to be penalized on top of that. Which is why my resume, when I return to the corporate world, *if* I return (the business might become successful enough to support a career all by itself, after all), will reflect that I spent 2 years working on a home business after being laid off, and nothing about my baby. Which, to be honest, is why I have the business in the first place (well, that and I like having my own money.)

  Permalink Thursday, March 16, 2006 10:47 AM