Lower pay for moms

Everyday Outrages Department

If you're a woman, on average, becoming a mother will cost you 17 cents off every dollar in your paycheck. If you're a man, your pay is likely to increase when you become a father.
?!?!@#?!??@#!
We all know there's a "wage gap" between women and men. But now a bunch of studies have shown that women with kids also get paid less than women without kids. One study, for example, found that women without children make 90 cents to a man's dollar. Moms make 73 cents, and single moms make 56 to 66 cents.
Oh, but it's because they take more time off when kids are sick etc., right? Wrong. A Cornell University researcher, Shelley Correll, released a study last year showing that the cause is discrimination. It's not mothers' "fault" for doing delinquent things like taking care of their kids.
Correll also found that mothers were less likely to be hired than non-mothers and were offered lower starting pay. (She figured this out by comparing the hiring experiences of equally qualified moms and non-moms.)
This discrimination is the latest target of an organization called MomsRising, an internet activism group trying to drum up political pressure for "family friendly" policies in the U.S. They've published The Motherhood Manifesto, which documents problems and proposes solutions on a wide range of issues from work policies to child care to health and more.
Lower pay for moms hurts kids! MomsRising quotes a researcher at the Institute for Women's Policy Research, who says that if this pay gap didn't exist, the poverty rate would be cut in half for single-mother families and the poverty rates for dual-earner families would be cut by 25%.
To see the solutions MomsRising is proposing for this and other problems, check them out at www.momsrising.org.
Jean