In recent years, parenting at work has taken center stage, bringing up topics like maternity and paternity leave, the cost of daycare services, and office milk storage policies. These conversations acknowledge the need to support the physical and emotional well-being of working parents. But what is happening at home? What are the challenges working parents face, especially women, when trying to parent and maintain full-time careers?

According to one study, a woman with one child earns 28% less than a woman without children across her career. This loss in lifetime earnings is due in part to time spent away from the workforce providing unpaid childcare and domestic services. The most significant and frequently underestimated effect of unpaid employment is that women have less time and energy to invest in fulfilling career endeavors. But why should women with children have higher poverty rates than women without children, a pattern that does not hold for men? This ultimately translates into limited retirement income for women in part because they spend a shorter time in the workforce, compounded by the fact that women earn less money than males on average even in similarly situated jobs.

Income vs Childcare

Take Jane and Kofi for instance, both were fully employed before they started a family. Once the baby came into their lives, they were compelled to start making strategic decisions to maintain joint income. With Jane’s maternity leave (3 months), and Kofi’s paternity leave (1 month) they were quickly able to develop a routine that made it possible for both to take care of and bond with the baby, manage domestic chores, and get their much-needed rest. When Kofi’s month of paternity leave ended, they were thankful that Jane could spend 2 additional months with the baby before returning to the office.

But Parents Can Share Child Care Duties and Also Work! Or?

What would happen after Esi’s maternity leave still remained up in the air? They were both paid by the hour and needed that double income to maintain their standard of living. They talked about Jane becoming a stay-at-home mum, or Kofi becoming a stay-at-home dad, but neither parent wanted to leave the workforce. It was not that simple. The parent giving up his/her job would lose financial independence, career progression opportunities, health insurance, and retirement income. Neither one of them wanted to take that leap so they started exploring flexible schedules, remote work options, and reduced working hours. Being front-line workers, both needed to work on-site 8 hours a day, Monday through Friday and so they agreed to each reduce their working hours. Kofi would go to work from 8 am till noon and return home by 1 pm to take over the childcare responsibilities so that Jane could go to work from 2 pm till 6 pm. They felt confident about this plan–they would both keep their jobs and professional network, avoid skill loss or skill-fade, and maintain a reasonable level of social interactions with peers and colleagues.

The remaining 2 months of maternity leave went by very fast and soon Jane was back at work. Even though they managed to split childcare duties whilst maintaining their careers, they noticed a drastic reduction in income. Since each one of them was working only half their regular time they jointly brought home the equivalent of one salary!

They went back to the drawing board to consider one parent dropping out of the workforce temporarily so that the other could focus on work, accelerate his/her career, and boost earning potential. The plan was for the stay-at-home parent to return to the workforce as soon as possible and pedal fast to catch up professionally. They were still re-considering the pros and cons of leaving the workforce when they found out that their close family friends Ato and Esi who were in the middle of a divorce were grappling with the consequences of a similar decision. Somehow the context (partners in marriage vs acrimony in divorce) seemed to color everything differently.

So Can we or Can We Not Quantify the Value of Time ?

Esi a stay-at-home mother, was reeling from hearing her husband’s lawyer state boldly in court that she had earned little to no income during the marriage, had not contributed to the acquisition of assets, and was therefore entitled to nothing. He seemed to place little to no value on the time that Esi had invested in child and home care, relieving Ato of all domestic responsibilities and giving him the freedom and peace of mind to chase his career and the income that came with it.

Esi was an accountant, and when they started having children, they jointly decided that she should be the primary caregiver, allowing Ato the opportunity and flexibility to invest fully in growing his career. They had never discussed the value of her time and the income she would forgo to take on caregiving, they never talked about how she would be compensated for lost opportunities such as promotions, tenure and loss of earnings. In hindsight, Esi felt that she had been negligent in the management of her career and financial affairs. She had made decisions in the family’s interest, without being conscious of the long-term implications, especially the impact on her career, her lifetime earning potential, and her retirement income.

Esi had been startled to learn that overall, 69 percent of women ages 62 and older who never have children work 35 or more years, compared with 59 percent of those with one or two children and 42 percent of those with three or more children. They both wondered as they explored these topics further, how they had never heard conversations about women’s retirement income and how it was impacted by unpaid work.

Jane could guide Esi because she was living that experience. If one parent in a two-parent family agrees to stay at home to take care of the children while the other parent focuses on their career, their combined earnings would remain the same as if both parents were working part-time and parenting half the time. This is because in the ideal two-parent home scenario, each parent would only be able to work part-time since parenting duties (during working hours) would be equally split. They would only earn half of their previous income in this scenario. And just like that, Esi understood and was able to place a monetary value on her time investment over years, even though it was based on an over-simplified formula that assumed several things, including the fact that the parents had similar earnings. It gave Esi so much clarity.