By Heather Cabral ·Updated May 11, 2023
In a capitalist country that supposedly values family, we’re doing a horrific job at creating and implementing policies that do just that, especially for working moms.
As we get closer to Mother’s Day, consumer obsession leads everyone to believe that what mothers want are things; a new purse, new shoes, a spa day, and brunch with our families. Those are indeed great, but what we really want is time, work-life balance, and support. There are few policies in the workplace that support work-life balance so that working women have the bandwidth to thrive both at home and in the workplace.
Black women have the highest percentage of participation in the labor force among all women, yet earn on average 63.0% of white, non-hispanic men’s earnings. Few companies have systems in place that offer transparency around equal pay, which has contributed to the wealth gap across races, and even fewer have systemic support that is intentionally created with the working mom in mind.
There’s a saying “women are expected to work like they don’t have kids, and parent like they don’t have work.” This is true for far too many women. As a mom to a very busy two-year-old, I am thankful however for a policy at my organization, Faith in Action, that was implemented five years ago to ensure balance between work and home, specifically for the Black and brown women on our team. It’s called Family Work Integration.
Working mothers make up nearly one-third of working women, and our contributions to the labor force are significant. Because of this, more and more companies recognize how critical it is to have policies that attract, retrain, and invest in working mothers. At Faith in Action, of the 52 staff members, 38 are women, almost all Black or Brown, 8 are moms of young children, and two are first-time expectant moms.
Family Work Integration was the brainchild of one of the organization’s first working mothers, Denise Collazo, our Chief of external affairs. It’s meant to hold space on Fridays for all the things we can’t tackle during the busy work week, this includes but isn’t limited to professional development, mental health, and physical health practices such as meditation, yoga, or a long run. For some, it can also be when you schedule a doctor’s appointment without the worry of rushing to and from work in the middle of the day, and most importantly, for holding space for caregiving needs.
For many millennials, we find ourselves in the gap, myself included, in caring for a toddler and also looking after an aging, live-in parent. Fridays are sacred to me, I use them for all the things I’ve listed. It’s policies like these that create the space for working moms to fully show up in both places. It’s policies like these that more companies should consider implementing.
Our organization is celebrating our 50-year anniversary and over the last five decades, the number of women, especially Black women, on staff and those who are mothers has grown exponentially. Thankfully, company policies like Family Work Integration have grown with us. It is not lost on me that parents have juggled work and children since the beginning of time. My own father, a widow, raised me on his own, and I saw him do this juggle. But it doesn’t have to be that way – hiring managers, human resource directors, and lawmakers, all have a role to play in helping families thrive.
There’s so much work to be done to ensure the next generation of working mothers have every single tool available to them to thrive, to show up in their lives as mothers and careerwomen. It surely can start with implementing workplace policies that support them.
So as we head toward Mother’s Day whether you’re a spouse, a manager, or a lawmaker, we should all be thinking collectively about creating better support systems for working moms. Think not about the tangible things we can give mothers, but instead, about the systems and policies that will actually support them.
Heather Cabral is the managing director of communications at Faith in Action and mommy to 2-year-old Brooklyn.
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