Working Mothers Who Make It All Work

This week we have both another guest editor, the wonderful Sarah Brafman, and another publication, the lacking Wall Street Journal, here waxing poetic on having it all. Let's just cut right to Sarah after the break.

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Women with big jobs earn enough to buy balance. . .Women in my study spent an average of 10 hours a week on housework and errands; the typical employed American mother spends about 19...at the top, women ordered what they could online, hired cleaning services and had household help to cook family meals. . .Her cleaning service handled heavy housework, allowing her to take guitar lessons on the weekend.

You want to talk about how "six figures" affect women, Wall Street Journal? Here are six figures that you should really be talking about. Until then, I really don't want to hear from you about a privileged fraction of the population whose ease and "balance" rests on a reliance on others who don't have the luxury of such stability:

• The minimum wage reached its peak level in 1968. Since then, Congress has raised the minimum wage only five times, and its value has dramatically eroded: at $7.25 per hour, the minimum wage is worth 24 percent less today than it was in 1968. A woman working full time at minimum wage earns just $14,500 annually, more than $4,500 below the poverty line for a mother with two children.
• The federal minimum cash wage for tipped workers is $2.13 per hour, unchanged since 1991. Tipped workers—two-thirds of whom are women—experience poverty at nearly double the rate of the workforce as a whole.
• Women are nearly two-thirds of minimum wage workers[1] and two-thirds of tipped workers.
• Women of color are 23 percent of minimum wage workers,[3] compared to 16 percent of all workers.
• The Economic Policy Institute estimates that if the minimum wage were increased to $12.00 per hour by 2020, more than 35.0 million workers would get a raise—including nearly 6.7 million workers earning between $12.00 and $13.00 per hour... nearly 19.6 million (55.9 percent) are women.
• If the federal minimum wage and tipped minimum wage were to rise to $12.00 an hour, annual earnings for a full-time minimum wage worker would increase by $9,500.

Dry cleaning is just another cost women face when they have babies without being able to remove their suits