It was odd to me that in this last week, I've read two articles about working mothers -- one in Newsweek and the other in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
The article in the Post-Gazette, a forum on Maternal Profiling, says that in Pennsylvania it's not yet illegal for employers to ask people if they're married or if they have children during a job interview. Some mothers, especially single mothers, have found themselves discriminated against and they weren't hired after answering these questions in interviews. One employer freely admitted to not wanting to carry the children on health insurance.
This just makes me angry. The article says there's a bill stalled in Pennsylvania legislature that would change the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act and make it illegal to ask these questions in interviews. My question is this: why is this stalled and why don't we have this law in place already? Being a working parent doesn't mean you don't get the job done. It just means you find more creative ways to get the job done. It means you have a broader base of experiences to draw upon. It means you have better time management. You have to. But becoming a parent does not make you a bad employee.
Then, in Newsweek, there's an article called Getting Back on Track, where you can read about women who quit work for a while to raise children, and then had trouble getting a job again when they wanted to return to the workforce. Supposedly, some companies are now addressing this issue, trying to make it easier for women to find a way back in to the workplace.
This seems rather idealistic to me. Maybe it's because of the field I work in. Maybe in education, advertising or health care, fields where there's more than one place to work in a town, it would be easier for a woman to get a job after taking time off. When I told my boss I was pregnant, one of the things he asked me was if I was coming back to work after the baby was born. I said yes, and it wasn't just because I thought I'd go stir-crazy at home all the time. I also said yes because I thought if I quit, I wouldn't be able to get a job in my field without having to move to another city. I'd either have to change professions or move. At the time, that was important to me.
I think a lot about how I can do what's best for me and for Autumn. Sometimes it's hard to mesh those two things together and do them both at the same time. I think about what kind of job would make me happy. What kind of job would work best for my life as a Mother. What kind of time I need to devote to Autumn to make sure she knows I'm there for her. What time Autumn needs to roam free, unrestrained by a schedule. It's a lot of thinking. I'm still not sure I've arrived at an answer yet, and she's almost 2.
Maybe by the time she's 18, I'll have figured it out.