Why I don't "like" the idea that mothers do the work of twenty, for free

I saw this image posted the other day on the Facebook page of a social networking site for mothers. When I last checked a moment ago, the picture had been shared 2,920 times (including by a friend of mine, whose status update is where I first saw it) and “liked” 3,742 times on this mothers’ site page alone.

I didn’t share the post. I did not “like” it. I didn’t even like it.

Which made me more or less alone among the 700-some people who left comments. I haven’t read every last one, but in a quick skim I didn't see any other commenter who wasn’t delighted with the sentiment expressed in the post. Typical comments—short and hastily typed, as if clicked out between laundry loads, or while waiting that cry from the nursery signaling naptime had ended—said things like “True!” and “Sharing,” and  “Ain’t this the truth,” and “AMEN,” and “Sounds about right” and “Us mums are incredible :)” and “LOVE LOVE LOVE this.”

Not to be a buzz kill. But this approving reaction goes a long way toward explaining why mothers’ labor gets exploited, why mothers, far from being financially compensated for their parenting work, are in fact financially penalized for performing it, to their eventual economic peril.

Oh, that's OK, the comments suggest. We don’t mind! Our children are so important to us. We’re happy to do it! We LOVE LOVE LOVE doing it!


Lots of people love their work. Yet many of them are nevertheless rewarded for it monetarily, sometimes handsomely. (At least writers, who also often wind up working for free because the market exploits their love of the work, complain about it.) Posts like this—simply the new-technology delivery of an age-old sentiment—are one way society reinforces the idea that good mothers don't mind sacrificing. That good mothers are proud of sacrificing.

The post isn’t quite accurate; even the most hardworking mothers don’t do the work of more than two or three people, tops. And not even that on average, according to a cover story in Time magazine in August, which reported that new research shows mothers work about the same amount as fathers—as long as you count both paid and non-paid work, since mothers unsurprisingly do proportionately more of the latter than fathers do.

“ What these new findings mean is that the widespread belief that working mothers have it the worst—a belief that engenders an enormous amount of conflict between spouses—is simply not the open-and-shut case it once was,” wrote Ruth Davis Konigsberg. “… And it's time that women — myself included — admit it and move on.”

Again, I must differ. Unless by “move on” Konigsberg means “turn our attention from who works more hours to focus on what is really the far bigger issue—i.e., the fact that many more of those oh-so-equal hours that fathers put in are rewarded with paychecks. Not to mention retirement accounts, professional advancement, earning power, social status, health and dental, the respect of future employers and the occasional company car.”

Whereas mothers, as even the disliked post above correctly notes, “work for free” much of the time.

Konigsberg doesn’t dwell on the pay thing. On the contrary, she barely mentions it, writing as if the issue of monetary compensation were a triviality, as if paid and unpaid work were, for all practical purposes, the same thing; work is work.

I, on the other hand, consider a paycheck a salient difference, if for no other reason because even when it's shared between partners, the partner whose name is on the checks is building a much stronger foundation of future employability.

Frustrating as it is to see that overlooked in a Time cover story, it's better than the other, far more widespread attitude: that paid and unpaid work are completely different. So different, in fact, that unpaid work actually isn’t work at all.

Mothers’ caregiving work doesn’t count for the purpose of acquiring health insurance or 401(k) contributions or Social Security credit. Mothers’ work doesn’t count even if their labor—washing diapers, meeting with teachers, driving to dental appointments, coaching with homework, preparing meals—frees the other parent to devote more time to work that does earn a paycheck and therefore does count. (To avoid being labeled sexist, let me note that the genders are occasionally reversed.)

Sure, by now anybody with a speck of cultural sensitivity is careful to use the PC terminology, to delicately distinguish between work “outside the home” and “in the home.” But that's one of the rare times when mothers’ caregiving work is treated like, well, work.

Mothers who “opt out” to care for their children are considered to have stopped working. If they later try to find a paid job, they worry about how to explain “the gap in their resume” as if having to rationalize a time when they weren’t working. I have talked to women who've been told they would be better off padding that gap with a minimum-wage, part-time, unskilled job than admitting to potential employers that they were at-home mothers.

This attitude helps explain why, even when they're getting paid and working in comparable jobs, mothers make less money than non-mothers (including fathers and childless people of either sex). It helps explain why more women than men are poor. It helps explain why so little status is attached to mothering, why at-home mothers often mention experiencing the “cocktail party demotion” in which they see people’s eyes, when they mention their occupation, dart around the room in search of better conversation, as if a (working) accountant or engineer is automatically better at exchanging sparkling repartee over the martinis.

It helps explain why, when I divorced and thereby lost my health insurance, I wasn’t eligible for the federal government program that, because of the bad economy, subsidized about two thirds of COBRA premiums for laid-off workers. Even though it was just as tough for me to find a job or afford COBRA (about $500 a month, in my case).

I may not have been doing the work of twenty people. But in the federal government's eyes, I wasn't even doing the work of one.

So am I suggesting that someone should start paying mothers a salary for taking care of their own children? Well, that's hard to envision, certainly in the current political climate. But folks, let's start considering it real work that deserves the respect and some of the economic protections and social benefits we give to other kinds of work. Either that, or let's insist that mothers and fathers share the work of parenting more equitably—that both, let's say, do the work of ten people.

Until then, damned if I'm going to “like” a post comparing me to a masochist and a saint. I have no interest in earning either label.

Here’s what I wrote in the comments:

True or not, celebrating this sort of slogan reinforces the idea that it's OK. Mothers should not be expected to do the work of 20 people for free. The work of raising children should be shared among fathers and the rest of the village, and mothers should not have to sacrifice their financial security to see that it gets done.

Four people clicked “like” on my comment.

Then the posted comments returned to “True!” and “Awesome!” and “Yup, spot on."

Male researcher: Women who post Facebook pictures could be appearance-obsessed, attention-starved, competitive sluts

You know that scene at the beginning of “The Social Network,” where the fictionalized Mark Zuckerberg gets in a fight with his fictionalized girlfriend in a bar, then storms home and gets revenge by inventing a “hot or not”-type site that includes his (now ex-) girlfriend’s picture?

Reading about this study made me wonder if its lead researcher had been in a fight in a bar with an ex-girlfriend who likes to post Facebook photos of herself.

Women who post numerous pictures of themselves and have lots of friends on Facebook aren't just sociable, or proud of their photos—they’re actually kind of messed up, according to the study, which was conducted at State University of New York at Buffalo, reported in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, described here in a university press release and publicized in the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere. In fact, the researchers seem to have concluded, it’s not just prolific picture posters but all women whose Facebook habits reveal identity and security issues.

[R]esearcher Michael A. Stefanone, PhD, and colleagues found that females who base their self worth on their appearance tend to share more photos online and maintain larger networks on online social networking sites.

He says the results suggest that females identify more strongly with their image and appearance, and use Facebook as a platform to compete for attention.

… Among other things, the team looked at the amount of time subjects spent managing profiles, the number of photos they shared, the size of their online networks and how promiscuous they were in terms of "friending" behavior.

Dr. Michael A. Stefanone finds women's Facebook habits "disappointing."

Thwarted romantic obsession might plausibly explain why, although half his subjects were men, Dr. Stefanone, an assistant professor of communications, hardly even mentions men except by implied favorable comparison to “females.” It might also explain the choice of the word “promiscuous,” which of course is Latin for “slutty,” to describe someone with lots of FB friends (though, to be fair—since the whole study isn’t available online without a subscription—there’s no way to know whether that word originated with Stefanone or the author of the press release). And surely post-rejection bitterness might shed light on why a researcher, examining what most people consider an innocuous, everyday activity—posting pictures of oneself on a site that, um, offers a popular tool with which users post pictures of themselves—interprets it so skeptically, at least when engaged in by women, as both a symptom of misplaced values and self-esteem and a calculating ploy to “compete for attention.”

Actually, up to a point I’m willing to go along with Stefanone’s ideas. I’m as interested in subtle sociological patterns as the next lifestyle journalist who took a few sociology classes in college, and I think studying the way people behave on Facebook—an novel communication medium now entrenched in the daily lives of millions—is worthwhile. I’m sure the lab coats could draw all kinds of fascinating conclusions about our innermost thoughts based on people’s Facebook habits, their status updates, their tendency to clutter up your newsfeed with their Farmville activity.

But … come on.

Not that my own FB experiences are empirical evidence of anything, but most of my friends who post lots of pictures of themselves strike me as people who like taking pictures and who do things like travel or get together with friends, activities they believe (rightly or wrongly) are of interest to others. Some of these Facebook photo posters are—get this—men. (“So if a man posts a lot of pictures on Facebook, does it mean he’s a woman?” asked one online commenter.)

No argument here with at least one of Stefanone’s findings, that women in our culture are concerned about their appearance. But that hardly requires extensive personality testing of Facebook users. It could be more easily demonstrated by, say, flipping through pretty much any random magazine this side of  Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking (and maybe that as well; again, I don’t have a subscription, so I have no way of knowing if it typically features weight-loss and makeup articles and photos of celebrities in bikinis).

Still, even if Stefanone and I agree on the phenomenon’s existence, I recoil at his description of it:

 “Although it's stereotypical and might have been predicted," he says, "it is disappointing to me that in the year 2011 so many young women continue to assert their self worth via their physical appearance -- in this case, by posting photos of themselves on Facebook as a form of advertisement. Perhaps this reflects the distorted value pegged to women's looks throughout the popular culture and in reality programming from 'The Bachelor' to 'Keeping Up with the Kardashians.'”

Perhaps?? I would think it obvious to anyone from the Kardashians to Naomi Wolf that cultural influences play a role here. Otherwise, why would it matter that the year is 2011? Implied in Stefanone’s quote is the assumption that, due to recent cultural changes, women should be over all this appearance-related “advertisement” bullshit by now. (Speaking of advertisements and women’s appearance, here is a great story and slideshow illustrating one important way cultural influence on women's appearance-consciousness has been and still is leveraged and how, as is so often the case, it’s tied to corporate profits.)

If cultural influences didn’t play a role, if instead every woman in Stefanone’s study were spontaneously and independently driven to act in this "disappointing" (at least, to Stefanone) way without having received any external cues … then we are left with either the also quite viable possibility that young human females are biologically driven to employ visual signals in their mating behavior (in which case it wouldn't much matter if it were 2011 or 500,000 B.C.) or we’re all living in an M. Night Shyamalan movie.

By the way, I became curious about what Michael A. Stefanone has posted on his own Facebook page, so I—promiscuous Facebook slut that I am—sent him a friend request. He accepted it right away, no questions asked. That is, whereas I was somewhat familiar with the person to whom I was extending an offer of friendship, he readily friended a total stranger. Wonder what conclusions about male behavior we can draw from that.

For the record, Stefanone has 8% fewer friends than me. He also has fewer photos.

However, of the 38 photos I’ve posted, I’m in seven. Stefanone has only 16 photos, but he’s in 13 of them.