For women who take a temporary leave from the workforce to care for
their children or family, returning can feel next to impossible. “I’ve
had a lot of really well-meaning people tell me to quit looking,” Hagit
Katzenelson, a programmer and mother, told one writer for the Harvard Business Review, “They’d say, ‘Come on, you’re banging your head against a closed door.’”
It certainly felt that way for Katzenelson at the time. Despite
having an electrical engineering degree, an MBA and 14 years of
experience in her field, she had to search for five long years for a job
after taking a four-year break to take care of her three
children. Katzenelson’s story isn’t an anomaly.
“I would get into interviews,” programmer Abby Carrales told the San Francisco Chronicle
earlier this year as she recounted her attempt to break back into the
workforce, “It would always come down to myself and another candidate.
When employers see a gap in a resume, they assume the person has left to
have children and that their career would always play second fiddle to
their primary-caregiver responsibility.”
Similar frustrations echo
across forums, magazine articles and social studies, all aligning with
the same narrative through line: If you leave to have kids, don’t expect
the working world to welcome you back. Research backs these anecdotes.
In February of 2018, one Harvard Business Review study found that stay-at-home moms were only half as likely to obtain a job interview
as a person who was laid off. Researchers further wrote that,
“Respondents viewed stay-at-home parents as less reliable, less
deserving of a job and -- the biggest penalty -- less committed to work,
compared with unemployed applicants.”
It’s a cold hiring
landscape. However, some have celebrated “returnship” programs as the
solution to returning mothers’s hiring woes, indicating that such
initiatives can provide former stay-at-home parents the tools they need
to break the ice -- partially, at least.
Introducing Returnships
Returnship programs aren’t, strictly speaking, new. Goldman Sachs launched the first returnship initiative a little more than a decade ago;
since then, 50-plus companies have opened their doors, including IBM,
Johnson & Johnson and United Technologies. In April, Apple offered a
17-week return-to-work program for professionals who both took time
away from work and have more than five years of professional experience.
These programs are typically open to people who have left their
industries for two or more years and last for a limited period --
usually between eight weeks and six months -- and are designed to
provide networking and mentoring opportunities, help returnees refresh
their professional skill set and give the company a chance to gauge
whether the returnee is a long-term fit.
A Solution, or Just a Flawed Fix?
For
both Katzenelson and Carrales, returnships were a lifeline, a means to
climb out from the hiring sinkhole they had been struggling with for
years. Both cited the returnships as stepping stones for getting back
into their careers. Their stories provide hope to stay-at-home parents
who want to return to work. And to be sure, all returnships offer
participants the chance to update their resume and gain professional
acceptance, even if they aren’t hired at the end of the program period.
However,
these programs are not without their flaws. While some returnships are
paid, many are not. Others require the returnee to pay for their
participation. Hiring, too, can vary widely. While Ford’s returnship
program hired 98 percent of its enrollees, Goldman Sachs only accepted 1.9 percent.
Both are on extreme and opposing ends of the hiring spectrum; research
indicates that most programs hiring between 50-100 percent of their
participants.
Then there are the semantics. Should experienced
moms fall under a subcategory of “interns”? For some, embarking on a
“returnship” may mean accepting -- at least subconsciously -- that their
skills are less valuable. As one writer protests in an article for Working Mother,
“Companies like Goldman Sachs actually play on this perceived lack of
expertise or skills. They promote the low self-confidence some people
feel after being out of the workforce and use it to their advantage.
Under the guise of helping people get up to speed and allowing employees
to ‘see if it is the right fit,’ they get a no-risk trial and can fire
you.”
This might not be entirely fair, especially given that these
programs do help participants add to their professional networks and
update their skills. However, the writer does have a point. While many
programs don’t approach their participants as low-level,
inexperienced or temporary staffers, the implication is baked into the
title. I would argue that the assumption of inexpertise and the
dismissal that the writer highlights is a symptom of a broader problem,
one that returnships can only partially address, even as they reinforce
it through nomenclature: the devaluing of and bias against mothers in
the workforce.
Go to the Source: Examining the “Mommy Tax” at Work
Returnships
are a halfway solution, but they don’t solve the underlying social
problem mothers face in the workplace. Research has repeatedly shown
that mothers who leave the workforce for an extended period to care for
children -- or even simply have children -- face penalties in their
career. One study conducted by the nonprofit thinktank Thirdway found
that women’s wages decreased by an average of 4 percent for
each child they had. Ironically, men’s wages increased by more than 6
percent when they had children. The gap between the genders remained
even after researchers controlled for significant factors such as
education, hours worked, experience and spousal incomes.
A study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology may shed some light on the cause of the gap.
Researchers wrote, “Mothers were expected to be less competent and were
less likely to be kept in the running for advancement opportunities
than were other female or male applicants who were applying for the same
high-level managerial position.” The writers further explained that
hiring managers expected mothers to adhere to overly “feminine” behavior
stereotypes; female candidates were believed to be too soft, too
focused on their home lives and not suited to the demands of a
male-dominated workplace.
With this, we can see that returnships
aren’t a golden career ticket for stay-at-home moms; instead, they serve
as a band-aid on the larger professional injury that social bias causes
for women in the workplace.
What Does This Mean for the Future?
I’m
not suggesting that women call for an end to returnships, or even that
they avoid them. Quite the opposite. I believe that we need to provide
more resources for stay-at-home mothers in and beyond the workplace. We
need to establish more apparent channels for re-entry, push for more
flexible and family friendly policies in the workplace and create
programs that acknowledge the skill set women already bring to the table
instead of framing their re-entry as an “internship.”
Most of
all, though, we need to turn our focus inward and face the
unacknowledged bias that so often prevents women with families from
returning to work. As one leader for the job listing company Apres put the matter,
“It’s one thing to say you are going to hire women on the sidelines,
it’s another thing to train your hiring managers to interview without
bias toward the gap.”
Gender bias isn’t going to be something we
can solve with a single training program or one push towards returnship
expansion. But if those in the business world launch a cohesive effort
to value, welcome and support women returning to work, we might be able
to give mothers a fair shot in the interview room.
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