Even The Most Successful Women Pay A Big Price In Pandemic



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Joyce Chen, an associate professor of development economics at Ohio State University, has had to put her research on hold this year to oversee her children’s virtual schooling. Chen is also teaching virtually this fall.

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Chen’s son Campbell (left) climbs on the couch as he becomes restless while doing school work at home.

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Joyce Chen and her children Campbell, 7, Bryn, 12, and Emerson, 10.

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Being A Mom Is Tough. Being A Mom In A Pandemic Is Even Tougher

A lawyer can work 45 hours a week and do quite well, Goldin says. But a lawyer, who puts in 80 hours a week and is willing to cut short a vacation to handle a client’s need not only earns disproportionately more — billing a lot more per hour — but also gains status, becoming partner.

Motherhood had a significant impact on women with MBAs Goldin found in a study published in 2010. Although starting salaries of male and female MBAs were fairly comparable, by mid-career, women’s earnings fell to just 64% of men’s.

Jessica Mintz worries about that gap. She spent 14 years in corporate marketing, earning an MBA and having two children along the way. She employed a full-time nanny until her younger daughter started preschool last fall. Then came the pandemic.


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With two small children at home all day, Mintz tried scaling her hours back to part time. Her husband’s intense sales job made him unavailable most of the time. When it became clear that schools in Los Angeles were not going to reopen this fall, Mintz decided to step back from work entirely and become a stay-at-home mom.

«I don’t know when this is going to end. I don’t know when we’ll be able to go back to something that resembled normal. But I do worry that when I get to that point, I’ll have had this gap,» she says.

Mintz worries that the lost time could make her less competitive, but given that she was already earning less than her husband, the decision over which parent would stop working was clear.

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«In terms of our family, there’s no way that it could have been him who stepped into this position,» she says.

Stepping off the career ladder is hard, but often there’s no choice when people choose to become parents. Amy Chantasirivisal counts herself among the fortunate few who found a way around that.

As a software engineer, Chantasirivisal spent 13 years working for startups in the «growth-at-all-cost» culture of Silicon Valley.

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Pandemic Forces More Women To Leave The Workforce

Pandemic Forces More Women To Leave The Workforce




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  • Transcript

«If it wasn’t seven days a week — and in some cases it was — it was on your mind seven days a week,» she says. She grew accustomed to being awakened in the middle of the night to diagnose issues.

When she became pregnant, she discovered her company had no formalized parental leave program. She and a colleague who was also pregnant at the time had to figure out for themselves how much paid time off they were due.

Six months after the birth of her son, Chantasirivisal realized she no longer had a path forward in the startup world.


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Enough Already: Multiple Demands Causing Women To Abandon Workforce

Last summer, she landed a new job at Wildbit, a small tech company founded by a husband-and-wife team who are themselves parents, a factor that was important to Chantasirivisal then and even more so now. Early on in the pandemic, her CEO told employees to take whatever time they needed to deal with and process what was going on.

«She gave us permission to be unproductive,» Chantasirivisal says.

Today, Chantasirivisal says business remains good, proving that even in a pandemic there are possibilities — just nowhere near enough and out of reach for far too many women.

  • gender wage gap
  • coronavirus pandemic
  • COVID-19
  • women in tech
  • working moms
  • coronavirus
  • academia



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