Good news! I’m pregnant! …Thanks to this guy. Am I looking at you? Or am I looking at the camera?
– You’ll look at the camera. We’re having a baby boy! Behind all my joy and excitement, I’m thinking… What about my career? How much is childcare gonna cost? And if I can’t afford it, then what? The annual cost of childcare per state varies. For instance, to put a baby in childcare in Georgia costs about $7,700 a year.
Nevada: about $10,000. Here in New York City, where it seems like we pay more for everything… Can I get a small coffee, please? That’ll be five dollars. You guessed it! We pay more. I am shopping around for daycares in the Park Slope area of Brooklyn.
How much it costs, what it’s like, that kind of thing. $1400 a month is sort of our base for younger kids, and it goes up because we offer different programs for older kids. It starts at about $450 a week, full time. That’s our starting rate. New Yorkers pay annually around $15,000.
And that’s for your run-of-the-mill, take-your-baby-for-eight-hours-and-not-hurt-it, type of place. But if I wanted my baby to go to the “Harvard” of nursery schools here in New York City, that boasts multiple libraries, music rooms, art studios, language labs, you name it!
Well, that costs more like $37,000. That’s for just one kid! What if I had twins? As a fun comparison, here in New York, it’s more expensive for me to send my son to daycare than it is to send him to college! For families who are living at or below the federal poverty level, the cost of child care is particularly difficult, if not impossible.
For instance, if I lived in Massachusetts, making around $2,000 a month, I would have to pay $1,700 a month on child care. That’s like 99% of my income for full-time care! That is crazy! Because of these high costs, even across different income levels, It’s mostly women who drop out of work to take care of the baby full-time.
The economist, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, has found that about one-third of highly-educated American women leave the workforce every year, and 74% of them say it’s the lack of decent childcare that’s the primary reason why. It does horrible things to your earning power.
And a lot depends how long you spend out of the workplace. If you take one year off, you forfeit, or you lose, about 15% of your earning power for the rest of your life. Three years off, you lose 46%. Employers look very suspiciously at those gaps in a resume. We know there’s a bias against working moms. It’s as though, you know, when you give birth, you lose your edge! We find that’s not true at all.
When women come back in, they want to be challenged, and they, oftentimes, have developed coping skills, leadership skills, multitasking skills, which are very transferable back to work. Interestingly, when you look at men, when they take a gap, they mostly take that break not to look after a person, but to go back to school.
Or to try out a start up! They’re usually repositioning themselves in the workplace, so, a break in employment for men is not penalized. The experts call this off-ramping. I like to think of it as me, a car, getting off the freeway of high earning potential and success. Studies of college-educated women in the United States found that we make almost as much as men from the ages of 26 to 33. But that’s when the buck literally stops!
Why? It’s because that’s when women typically start leaving work to have babies. So, by the age of 45, we make 55% as much as men. I make $66,000 a year. I make $120,000 a year! Which means…drum roll please! The gender pay gap is largely because of motherhood. What do we do?! Good question! There are a couple of ways to tackle this.
First, public policy. We need better access to affordable, high-quality childcare. That would allow both Tyler and me to keep working. And it would help shrink the pay gap later on. This can work! In Quebec, Canada, I could use universal, $7-a-day childcare from the day my son is born, ’til he is ready to go to kindergarten.
That’s a total of about $9,000 for five years of full-time care! Remember in New York City, I will have to pay $75,000 for the same amount of time. By the way, this government program in Quebec, created in the 90s, significantly improved women’s employment rates.
Okay, next are employers themselves. We, as women, need to demand the companies we work for do more to help cover the cost of childcare. Currently only 2% of American organizations help employees with subsidies or vouchers to offset the cost. And only 1% offer on-site daycare. That’s insane! After all, women staying in the workforce helps companies and the country’s bottom line!
Let’s go back to Sylvia. The productivity, the earnings we lose collectively when women are sidelined, it’s about 3% of GDP. 83% of professional women — women on track with college degrees, that’s how we define them — 83% of these off-rampers, by the end of three years, want to come back to work. But only 40% of that 83% end up finding… good jobs.
Jobs in their field! Jobs that are full-time! So in a way, we underutilize women for the rest of their lives. At the end of the day, as long as it’s the mothers and not the fathers that are taking family leave and are the ones expected to drop out of work to take care of the kids, the lifetime pay gap seems certain to remain.
That’s why in our family, it’ll be this guy, staying home to take care of our beautiful baby boy. Good luck! Do you have kids? Let us know how much you pay for child care in the comments below, and share this video!
