‘If health is wealth, America’s working mothers are living in extreme poverty’
If health is wealth, America’s working mothers are living in extreme poverty. That’s the headline on a white paper written by Ann Somers Hogg, director of health-care research at the Clayton Christensen Institute. I recently spoke with Somers Hogg about the conditions working mothers face in the U.S., conditions that create $55 billion in lost productivity each year due simply to school calendars.
“Top line, working mothers are disproportionately bearing the burden of poor physical health, poor mental health, and this is on top of the economic burdens that are amplified by parenthood,” Somers Hogg said on an episode of my Money Life podcast.
“One is not an employee from 9 a .m. to 5 p .m. and a mother from 5 p .m. to 9 a .m. because the school calendar doesn’t align to the workday. And it also doesn’t align on an annual schedule. In the working world in the United States, we don’t have a summer break” she told me.
“And the conflict, this loss productivity arises not just from the conflict in an average workday, but also from the fact that when children are sick and they have to miss school, mothers are generally the first line of defense. They get the call before the fathers do usually. A lot of households in the United States are led by single mothers. So there is only one option for calling” she said,
Those conflicts are not the only ones taking a toll on the health of working mothers.
“Right now in our society, we have a lack of agreement on both the root causes and the goals of addressing the maternal health problem. Nationally, we do tend to agree on the fact that our maternal mortality is bad and we should work to reduce maternal mortality in the first year of the woman's life after she gives birth” Somers Hogg said.
“But what I’m talking about in this report is actually the health of the mother over the life of the parent and why this is such an issue for not just the individual, but for families, for employers, and for the nation as a whole.”
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