Don't call me a "working mom"

Or: Words mean (a lot of) things

I’m a mom who works for money, but please don’t refer to me as a “working mom.” This might be a weird take for me since I (a) technically am a working mom and (b) work in DE&I, where I focus on many parenthood-related issues. “Working mom” is central to my personal and professional universe. 

Motherhood and work are not topics I should be tired of (though working while having a 7-month-old is tiring in a literal sense). And I’m tired of the term “working mom” – I’m tired that this tired, old, outdated, infuriating, misleading, classist phrase is everywhere still. I did a quick Google search and was flooded with working moms making headlines. From Fortune: “Amazon’s RTO mandate leaves working moms behind.” From McKinsey’s Insights page: “Working moms are fueled by flexibility—here’s why.” From Gallup: “4 Things Leaders Need to Know to Support Working Moms.” From Bloomberg: “Working Moms Have A Secret: We Love Our Jobs.” Now you’re probably getting tired of “working mom,” too! 

When I hear or read “working mom,” I always detect that same undertone — a tone that sounds a whole lot like judgment. A tiny little voice that sounds eerily like my voice whispers: “You can’t be a good mom while you work.” Meanwhile, we don’t often hear the word “working father” because it’s a “balanced term”: It’s a normal part of fatherhood to provide and work, and thus, not necessary to point it out. The implication, communications professor Fern L. Johnson argues, is that if mothers engage in paid work, it takes away something from the quality of their mothering. (And there’s that little voice in my head again.) We literally can’t have it all.¹

When I returned to work after taking my 16 weeks of paid maternity leave, I was surprised that Ben was the only baby younger than six months at his daycare. I quickly learned that most moms at my Swiss daycare take several months of unpaid leave on top of the federally mandated four months paid. Five separate moms (let’s leave that one alone for now) looked at me with that particular (read: judgy) mix of pity and wonder, and asked: “How did you do it? I just wouldn’t have been able to leave [insert baby name] with others already!” (Given the names at our daycare, the name was probably “Elio” or “Mia” or “Matteo”). 

A portrait of Ben’s mom starting him at daycare at four months old. “Die Rabenmutter” means “bad mom.” German has a word for everything!

There are no neutral takes on how mothers should spend their time because, as a (patriarchal) society, we assume that for women who are mothers, time is not our own to spend; it is to be spent in service of our children. She works? Her baby is in daycare? As if working to feed my family wasn’t also a key part of being a mother. 

Both the term “working mom” and its counterpart, the “stay-at-home mom,” frame paid work as real work and minimize the burden of (unpaid) care work. The stay-at-home mom’s defining trait is that she stays at home, a very passive description; she hangs out, doesn’t do much, and remains in her place. The physical and emotional labor she does “at home” does not come into the wording, probably because that’s what we expect of mothers, of women. The care work gap is real: In Switzerland, women do 50% more care work than men (housework and family-related chores). If you add up the total hours worked per week (paid and unpaid), women actually work slightly more hours than men; they just don’t get paid for much of it.² Let’s normalize the radical notion that care work is real work.  

To me, the term “working mom” also drips with privilege because it is implied that there is a choice to be made – to be a mom or a working mom. Johnson states, “The term ‘working mother’ is a problematic linguistic construction. … In the linguistic structure of adj + n, the adjective comments about the noun and is subordinate to it. The implication here is that mothers do not necessarily need to work. An adjective, thus, is needed to establish a subset of mothers who do work, just as the adjective ‘barking’ would establish a subcategory of ‘dogs’ to clarify that only certain dogs are to be included in the term.”

This is true in my case. I feel privileged because I could choose not to work (for money), and my family could live comfortably without my income. Historically, the term “working mom” or “working mother” emerged as a descriptor for middle-class women who, to overgeneralize, took over men’s jobs during World War II and then left those positions when the “boys” came home. In the 50s and 60s, they worked socially acceptable jobs (often assisting men), such as secretary, phone operator, or personal assistant, to boost the family income or until they married.³ Or at least so the narrative goes. Then and now, the narrative excludes women who have no choice but to work. 

Did ChatGPT just create hauntingly bad fan art of Bella Swan Cullen and Renesmée?

Who do we mean when we say “working mother”? The answer becomes abundantly clear when you Google “working mom” or ask ChatGPT to auto-generate an image. I know who I picture. When you say “working mom,” I think Anne Hathaway in “The Intern”; I think Catherine Reitman in “Workin’ Moms”; I think Lauren Graham in Gilmore Girls; I think Sarah Jessica Parker on the movie poster for “I Don’t Know How She Does It.” I think White and white-collar, socio-economically privileged, straight, thin, pretty. 

A visual representation of what a “working mom” looks like in a brain. Baby Boom is a highly underrated Diane Keaton movie from 1987, the approximate year where the term “working mom” belongs.

This narrative excludes some of the most vulnerable “working moms.” For example, while women make up just under half of the workforce in the United States, they account for nearly two-thirds of workers in the 40 lowest-paying jobs. Women from all racial backgrounds — particularly Latinas, Native American women, and Black women — are disproportionately represented in low-wage roles. Over a quarter of women in this low-paid workforce (27 percent) have at least one child under 18 at home. The vast majority of mothers in these 40 lowest-paying jobs are the primary or sole breadwinners for their families, with Black mothers being especially affected. These women get crowded out of the conversation about the plight of the “working mom,” which can take many forms and encompass challenges from breast-pumping in a law office, working a ten-hour shift at McDonalds, not finding safe modes of transportation to night jobs, to not being able to afford feeding the kids a balanced diet.

thank u, next.

I might be the stereotypical “working mom” in the sense the term is generally used. But just to drive the point home that it’s not a flattering term, consider this: Being a mom who works detracts (according to “society”) from how good a mom I am. But at the same time, it also detracts from my qualities as a worker! The inherent problems with capitalism aside, the working mom is also often seen as a lesser worker. Work isn’t her priority; she is distracted; she doesn’t get enough sleep; she has to miss work if her kids are sick; etc.⁴ 

But perhaps we’ve already exhausted the topic for today. So I leave you with this: Words mean things and often mean multiple things. In conclusion: Be careful how you use them and who you use them for. 

1. There are lots of similar words that only exist for moms: Think soccer mom; mom guilt; Tiger mom; dance mom; helicopter mom; cool mom. For dads, I can only really come up with “dad bod.”

2. In 2020, women in Switzerland did so much unpaid family and domestic work that they would have had to be paid almost CHF 260 billion if they had been paid at market rates.

3. See, for example: Miller, M. L., Moen, P., & Dempster-McClain, D. (1991). Motherhood, Multiple Roles, and Maternal Well-Being: Women of the 1950s. Gender and Society, 5(4), 565–582.

4. My colleague Jamie Gloor and her co-authors wrote a brilliant paper about how the “motherhood bias” already starts before women even get pregnant - the “maybe baby” bias.