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I get that this is a way to illustrate the value of what moms who care full time for their children do, but the fact is, women don’t get paid for this tiring, never-ending work and assigning a fake dollar figure to it is really kind of patronizing and not very useful.
Now, if you want to talk about how the Social Security system does a number on women who take time off of work to care for family or do so and end up getting divorced, that would be time well spent. As N.Y. Rep. Carolyn Maloney notes in this Huffington Post piece:
“Social Security's formula calculates your benefits by averaging your 35 highest-paying years. If you have enough zeros because you're a stay-at-home for part of your career, that average comes down, those years count against you, and you effectively lose money.”
And stay-at-home moms get penalized if a couple gets divorced if they have been married under ten years because each spouse then gets only the Social Security benefits he or she earned in the paid workforce. So if a woman is home for nearly ten years doing the unpaid work that makes his work possible, while the whole family is cared for, the husband gets 100 percent of his benefits. The woman gets nothing for those years.
Passing laws to change policy inequities likes these would be a good start. And pressing more states to pass paid leave laws that allow workers who need to take time off from work to care for a family member without losing all of their pay (or their jobs) would be far more useful than paying lip service to the unpaid work we do.
What do you think?
