The Motherhood Penalty

 

Photo credit: CBO creative planet.

Have you heard of the term "The motherhood penalty"?

It is the systemic disadvantage and loss of earnings women face in the workplace after having children, largely driven by lost career momentum, wage gaps, and caregiving biases.

The severity varies globally based on cultural and economic factors. However, its impact is consistently felt across multiple areas of a woman's career. Research shows that in the U.S., full-time working mothers earn about 35% less than full-time working fathers.

How will it then look like in Africa?

Motherhood penalty does not only include wage gap, hiring and promotion bias, but also the "care penalty", where the burden of unpaid domestic labor and childcare disproportionately falls on women. The cost of child care is high and also is the cost of hiring domestic labour, hence, many women are forced to leave the workforce entirely or take reduced-hour/more flexible roles that pay less.

If there's a sacrifice that needs to be made, the woman is turned to in expectations of being the one that should make that sacrifice, even if she has come to her wits end.

Now, men won't acknowledge the sacrifices and unpaid labor of women. They would rather be summed up as the tasks of a "woman." I mean, what else are you good for? Right?
Even your finances should be submitted to the man.

How I distaste that title "Mrs"!
Why does a woman have to move from Miss, to Mrs, while a man still stays with Mr., whether single or married?

It's a strategy society employed to sell marriage to women as a path to step up in status, so that it can look attractive enough to enter into a life of unpaid labour and loss of self, while keeping you manageable and under.

You'll work your fingers to the bone, sacrifice your mental health, your emotional stability, your dreams and pursuits, finances and financial potential, and still be told to wife harder or be a better mother, while the man remains a recipient of your labor and sacrifices.

I will always say, the technique of manipulation, this opium of enslavement that has been used on women for generations need to be carefully understudied. The genocide of women - their future, their hopes, their sanity, their passion, their very lives, by this systematically structured manipulation has claimed more lives, dreams, and aspirations, than the transatlantic slavery, the genocide of the Jews, and any other crime against humanity ever recorded in history put together. This is a transgenerational and continuing genocide.

Your experiences and realities as a woman are never the same as that of a man. Even when you are successful and financially buoyant, people are looking to tie your success to a man. However, nobody looks to tie a man's success to the woman who clearly was the very architect of his success. The best they could come up with is, "Behind a successful man, there's a woman." Behind.

Why? Have you wondered why?

It's just like setting a high bar for a person to jump over, being convinced that there was no way she could jump over that bar; and for many generations, that worked. Then, suddenly, you see her on the other side having actually jumped over the bar, regardless. Now, you are all suspicious. Not because human beings are not meant to be on that other side, but because you know what you did!

The ignorance of the systemic bias you face as a woman, in the society, in religion, in marriage, at the workplace, and in other facets of life, is a deathtrap. Until the very scales fall from your eyes, you might even be an enabler of the prejudicial system against women, and still think everything is as it should be.