Leslie Morgan Steiner, who edited the book Mommy Wars (Random House, 2006) and wrote the On Balance blog about work and family for three years for washingtonpost.com, has a list she calls “short and sweet dos and don’ts for stay-at-home moms who want to return to work.” High on the list: Get serious.
“Be decisive about returning to work,” she says. “No one wants to hire someone who projects indecision.”
It’s a factor in what Steiner insists can be a relatively quick, even if not painless, return to remunerative employment. Steiner is an optimist, particularly when it comes to the subset of women with education and experience along with determination.
“Contrary to all the frightening myths you hear about how hard it is for moms to find jobs,” she says, “when you narrow the pool to college-educated women who’ve been out of work for fewer than 10 years and are looking for full-time jobs in their field and the same geographic area, moms have no trouble going back.” The mother of three, Steiner left her full-time position at The Washington Post; she now writes Two Cents, a weekly column for mommytracked.com, a website for working mothers, from her home in the District.
But for many women, the conditions that forced them out of the workforce in the first place also make it difficult to return.
“The structure of the workplace makes it all or nothing [in the U.S.],” says Melissa Milkie, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland in College Park. “You can have fantastic jobs where you have to give 50 hours a week—but if you can’t [work that many hours], then you have zero hours. It’s not a great choice.”
Phyllis Stallone, who lives in Bethesda, quit her job as a lawyer when her son was born in 1995, just 15 months after the birth of her daughter. Her legal specialty was personal injury litigation. “It was demanding and time-consuming,” she recalls, and inflexible.
She stayed home for 11 years. In 2006, as she and her husband were preparing to separate, she started looking for legal work. Failing to find a job as an attorney, she tried for paralegal positions. Failing that, she applied for any position she saw open. Still, no work. In 2007 she signed up with a temp agency, which placed her in an entry-level administrative position at Choice Hotels in Silver Spring, the corporate home of Comfort Inn, Sleep Inn, EconoLodge and other hotels. The position had nothing to do with her area of expertise. And she was overqualified. She took it.
“I just wanted a job,” she says. “I had had such trouble getting back into the marketplace.”
Although “you can’t prove anything,” she says she felt a number of factors were working against her. “Age has to be a factor,” says Stallone, who is 49.
“And I was out too long. Maybe age wouldn’t have been a factor if I’d been working all along. …But I hadn’t practiced in 11 years. Who are they going to hire: somebody fresh out of law school or someone older, maybe a little out of step with how things are being done?”
Or perhaps it was merely because she was a mother. Stanford University social psychologist Shelley Correll designed a study to test employers’ attitudes toward hiring mothers, using applicants with identical résumés except for one telling detail—membership in a PTA. Women who listed a PTA membership (but made no other mention of motherhood) were less likely to be called back. Those who were hired were offered less pay. Men who listed a PTA membership on their résumés were unaffected.
Truss and Stallone both knew they wanted to go back to work. But the decision doesn’t come easily to everyone, especially when children are young.
A focus of Milkie’s research at the University of Maryland has been tracking how parents spend their time. She says the life of a stay-at-home mother can be so full that it becomes almost impossible to imagine accommodating employment as well.
“Kids have very complex lives,” she says. “The demands on a mother are ambiguous and never-ending. Once they have been home for a while, it becomes hard to imagine fitting a job back into the very busy life they have as a homemaker. …They’re thinking, ‘How can I possibly go back to work 20 to 40 hours a week?’ ”
At the same time, some are thinking: How can I not?
Wendy Clark’s two sons were in high school when she decided it was time to return to work, but she couldn’t imagine going back to what she had done before, which was practicing law with a specialty in health-related issues. “Working as a lawyer part-time is 40 hours a week,” says Clark, who lives in Northwest D.C. “I knew I wasn’t going to go back to putting in 60 hours.”
The answer came to her as she lay on her acupuncturist’s table. “It really was one of those bolt of lightning moments,” she says. “I thought to myself: I am fascinated by this. I want to learn how to do it.”
She spent four years studying and training at the Tai Sophia Institute in Laurel. She now practices acupuncture in Bethesda and Silver Spring.
“What I knew I was looking for was a new passion in life,” she says. “My kids were my passion for 18 years. I knew I needed something else that I loved. …If you keep your mind open to what else is out there, I think you find it.”
In my 12-odd years of unconventional self-employment—also known as joblessness—my family and I lived on three continents. My husband’s work dictated the moves; I organized them. I managed every detail of the transition from one country to the next. I oversaw the purchase, renovation and sale of three of our 10 homes (two without a real estate agent). I reared two daughters and a stepdaughter. I helped care for my father as he succumbed to complications from Alzheimer’s disease and prostate cancer, which meant everything from managing his finances, to strategizing with the police when he started wandering, to changing his locks and hiring lawyers when his partner left him, to hiring his caregivers and then rehiring them after he fired them (which he did as a matter of routine). I was the trustee of his trust and, when he died, the executor of his will. In whatever fragments of time there were to spare, I wrote. I still have a half-written thriller on an old iMac, a collection of short stories that aren’t half bad, and a dozen children’s stories in varying stages of readiness. But I didn’t have a job.
I was like many of the women (and occasional men) who take the Commission for Women’s workshops on returning to work and range in age from their late 20s to 65. They are younger women whose kids are entering preschool, older women whose kids have left home, women who have taken time to care for elderly parents, and women who have been doing both. They often arrive with their self-esteem in tatters. “Women who have taken time off, they’ll say to me, ‘I’ve forgotten what I do, what I can do,’” Fireman says.
Whatever their work once was, she says, “If you’re not actively doing it and giving yourself credit for what you’re doing, and valuing what you’re doing, you do forget.
“There are still some that have self-esteem and self-confidence,” she adds, “…the women who have kept their hand in some type of work, whether part-time, consulting, volunteering, they seem to have a better handle on things, even if it was just a project…
“The others, they can seem very confident on the home front, but when it comes to work they’ll tell me, ‘I’m not sure I can even do it.’ We talk about what ‘it’ is. …What are the barriers? What are you afraid of?”
Nancie Kenney, who also works as a career counselor for the commission in Rockville, sees it, too. “Women often feel they’ve lost their skills, they’ve lost their edge,” she says. “They were really good at what they did, but everything has changed since they left.”
It was true for Truss, the former information services director. Every aspect of the work she once did—computer systems, telephones, database applications, hardware, software—changed completely in the time she was away.
“I kept thinking, what am I going to do?” she says. “Having been out so long, you don’t know what you can do anymore.”
She sat down at the computer and started Googling friends, colleagues, acquaintances. She came across someone she had hired once. “We met for lunch and talked about possibilities. …And then some days later she phoned and said, ‘Actually, I have a project I need help with. Right now.’ ”
Truss hesitated. “I thought, I’m not ready. The kids aren’t settled. I need to get my curtains up. All these projects. …And then I thought, wait a minute, this opportunity may not come again. I’d be stupid to say no. And so I said yes. Two weeks later I was working.”
Since January she has been a senior business analyst working on the Obama administration’s data center consolidation initiative, a program geared toward saving energy and money in the operation of the federal government. As she did 15 years ago, she commutes by Metro to an office a few blocks from the White House.
“People are more casual now,” she has noticed. “Shoes have changed. All the women wore sneakers then. Now they wear flip-flops. And those bedroom slippers. Stupid looking things. Give you no support. Younger girls seem to wear them.”
She laughs. “You can tell the generations by their footwear,” she says.
And then there is the shoulder-pad situation. “I always thought I would go back to work,” she says. “I had a lot of suits. They were decent suits.” But they all had shoulder pads. “As a matter of fact, I have perfected opening up the seam in the lining in the back, and then reaching in and pulling out the shoulder pads.” Even so, the suits are “a little out of style. I may have to get rid of them.”
Truss describes returning to work as daunting. “It was a little scary. But this job has allowed me to take baby steps to get back in, to regain my confidence, regain my knowledge, to get used to the whole 9-to-5 routine,” she says. “I feel so lucky.”
Stallone, the former lawyer, was not as lucky. Her hope in taking the temp job at Choice Hotels was that it would lead to full-time work. Initially it did. She became a contract specialist, handling franchise contracts for hotels in the chain. She started to make use of her legal training. Earlier this year, she was promoted. And then, after three years at Choice Hotels, she learned that her position was being terminated. “I can understand,” she says. “Financing is tight. People aren’t building hotels. …If there aren’t contracts coming in, they don’t need contract specialists.
“I guess had I known then what I know now I could have searched for a different job from the beginning. But I really liked litigation and that’s the route I took,” she says. “And then it was my personal preference and my personal decision to stay home with my children. …
“I’ll never regret staying at home with my children,” she says. “But I feel like telling young women: Don’t go into the legal profession.”
My own route back to work has been circuitous and serendipitous. It started with a rented office at Bethesda Magazine. It evolved, into freelancing and then a job as managing editor of Applause, the Strathmore Music Center’s magazine, published by Bethesda Magazine. Stay tuned…
Ellen Bartlett is a writer living in Chevy Chase.
