You know the one I mean. The one that says that a stay at home mom works 92 hours a week and ought be making 140 grand a year.
I get their point: stay at home mothers (and mothers in general) are underappreciated. For the most part, I even agree with them. Guys who like to crow about how they’re the “breadwinner” while their wife is at home cooking, cleaning, raising the kids, etc. are complete jackassess. But instead of making the point honestly, these so-called researchers have concocted an absolutely ludicrous measure of a mother’s worth.
Basically, they come up with every job a mom does in a day, find out how much it would cost you to pay a servant to do that job, and then add up the result and call it the “salary” the mother’s work is worth. Surely they must expect people to look at this salary in comparison to actual salaries that people make. But no one gets paid for every chore they do around the house. Do I get paid whenever I clean the bathroom, vacuum the living room, take out the trash, walk the dogs, or drive myself to work? Hell no! My point is, everyone’s salary and number of hours worked would be vastly inflated if you counted every random chore they do as part of their work week. Yet rather than computing the total number of hours the average person spends on all forms of “work” (which I imagine would still have the stay-at-home mom towards the high end) they go for broke and toss out a figure like $140,000 as if it’s even remotely reasonable to compare that number to what you or I get paid by our employers. It’s not.
Then there’s the matter of the choice of jobs they attribute to the mother:
housekeeper, day-care center teacher, cook, computer operator, laundry machine operator, janitor, facilities manager, van driver, chief executive officer and psychologist.
Please, you’re getting a CEO’s salary for what, running your home? That’s the same as running a corporation? I’m not saying CEO’s deserve their typically-bloated salaries, but there are economic reasons why they’re able to get people to pay them – reasons which don’t factor in when it comes to being a mother. For starters there are a lot more people with experience being a mom than experience running a company. Golly, I wonder what the “researchers” motive was in including such a high paid job in their calculations.
Likewise, are you a psychologist because you talk to your kids about their problems? Get a clue. Psychologists (like many of the other careers on that list) have specialized training. Part of why they make the money they do is because of their degree. Just because you’re able to counsel your own kids doesn’t mean you have the qualifications to be a psychologist.
If the “researchers” wanted to be honest, they could have just looked up the average salaries of the jobs most comparable to being a stay-at-home mom. Like, say, being a live-in nanny. Anyone want to bet that the average live-in nanny makes 140 grand a year?
Instead of doing a realistic assessment of the no-doubt substantial amount of work the average mother does in a week, these “researchers” seem to have gone out of their way to inflate the mother’s monetary worth. (As if how much a person gets paid in any way correlates to the importance of their job, anyway. :rolleyes: ) Anyone who’d sacrifice honest reporting of the unbiased truth for the sake of their agenda doesn’t deserve to call themselves a researcher. Shame on them, and shame on the media for uncritically reporting this kind of junk research.
Oh, look, I just spent 10 minutes typing up a rant. I’d like a 6th of a secretary’s hourly wage now, please.
