Parliament: Pennies On The Dollar
Last week at the retreat, someone said something to me that I haven't been able to shake.
We were talking about hiring, and they said, "Have you ever hired moms after they've left the workforce to take care of their kids? You can usually get them for pennies on the dollar. They're really good and they work their ass off."
They meant it as advice. And they’re not wrong about the leverage. They were wrong about what to do with it.
This is the same conversation I was having two weeks ago, from a different angle, when I wrote about breaking the patriarchy from your own kitchen table. That one was about what happens at home. This one is about what happens at the negotiating table, or what happens when there isn't one.
The research backs up what that comment was really describing. Mothers are offered lower starting salaries than equally qualified non-mothers in hiring experiments, and are seen as less competent and less committed to their jobs, according to a widely cited Cornell study published in the American Journal of Sociology.
Separate research out of the University of Massachusetts found mothers' wages drop by roughly 4% per child, even after controlling for experience and hours worked. Meanwhile women overall still earn about 84 cents for every dollar men earn, per Pew Research Center's most recent analysis. None of that is because these women are less skilled. Some of it is bias. Some of it is that women are socialized to not ask, and stepping away to raise kids gets quietly recoded as a discount.
At Hoot, we won't pay someone new more than someone already doing the job at the same level, just because the new hire moved around and our employee didn't.
Women are less likely to leave for a raise when they've finally found a place that offers them flexibility and actually sees them. That's not a lack of ambition. That's the cost of finding something rare, and they shouldn't get punished twice for it: once by a market that made flexibility scarce, and again by an employer who assumes their loyalty means they'll settle for less.
So here's where we've landed: we operate as if our payroll could become public tomorrow. If a number would embarrass us next to another one, it was never right to begin with.
We're not interested in being the agency that hires moms for pennies on the dollar because we can.
I can say that plainly, with a strong back and a soft front, because of Brand Being. When your values are actually defined, you don't have to guess at what you'd do under pressure. You already know.
If you're thinking about how pay, culture, and brand connect inside your own company, that's exactly the kind of conversation Brand Being is built for. [Explore the Brand Being Method] →
