The household income math isn't working for many couples with kids, and the latest Gallup survey results revealed below are a good indication of why.
Research shows that the motherhood penalty is responsible for nearly 80 percent of the gender pay gap, and the pay gap widens as women age and are more likely to have children.
It's not lost on me that non-financially related factors play a role in deciding how to move forward after the birth of a child. Some women leave the workforce for a few years based on such factors, and some men do the same.
Early in our marriage, my wife and I had to decide how to manage the cost of childcare with our careers. We slipped into the decision by weighing only the short-term financial implications, making the default decision to weigh her income with the cost of childcare.
Doing so was financially short-sided, and where the math mentioned to begin this post doesn't match the career adjustment considerations for couples.
The Urban Institute projects that the lifetime employment-related cost to women of providing caregiving is a loss of $295,000 in lifetime compensation for each year she is not in the workforce.
According to PEW, 45% of households are comprised of women earning roughly the same, if not significantly more, than their husbands.
As I shared in my latest for The Good Men Project, there is a culture dislocation of perceptions of folks originating from political proclivities, with significant numbers of Republican voters believing that women should return to their traditional roles in society.
I don't know if politics is a marker of causation or correlation, but people from every party should do the math before making their decisions.
Simply put, household income math often works better when women can continue to excel in their careers.
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