University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

American working mothers and the possible part-time solution

(USC Thesis Other)

American working mothers and the possible part-time solution

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content AMERICAN WORKING MOTHERS AND THE POSSIBLE PART-TIME SOLUTION by Sasha Mary Kopas ________________________________________________________________________ A Professional Project Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERISTY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS (PRINT JOURNALISM) May 2008 Copyright 2008 Sasha Mary Kopas ii Table of Contents Abstract iii American Working Mothers and the Possible Part-Time Solution 1 Bibliography 22 iii Abstract American working mothers face numerous and specialized challenges at work and at home. However, the U.S. government offers them little support. Part-time work is often a great solution because it allows women to raise families without permanently sacrificing their careers. However, many women cannot afford to do this, and those that can are often penalized at work. In addition, the U.S. is the only industrialized country that does not offer paid maternity leave, despite the fact that it improves the health of mothers and babies and benefits employers. Many private companies are beginning to offer paid maternity leave as well as flexible or reduced schedules. However, the U.S. government has yet to pass any laws forcing employers to offer these family-friendly policies. 1 American Working Mothers and the Possible Part‐Time Solution In America, working mothers are worshipped as superwomen-at least the famous ones. Actresses flaunt their pregnant bellies, and celebrities share their adoption stories in magazines. Politicians earn bi-partisan applause by lauding a return to family values, and corporation heads tout the need for a work and family-life balance. However, real-life working mothers receive little practical support, even from the most family-friendly companies. In fact, to work and parent successfully, you almost have to be, well…superwoman. In October of 2007, twenty-nine-year-old Kimberly Garber, a special project manager for the University of Southern California School of Dentistry, thought a part-time schedule would be the best of both worlds. She could spend time with Corinne, her eight-month- old baby, and make use of her very expensive college education. “It’s important for a parent to be home with their child as much as possible. But I didn’t know how I would like staying home 100 percent of the time,” Garber said. As is often the case, there was also a financial component to her decision. “I also enjoy spending money…we would have had to have been on a budget had I completely stopped working,” Garber said. “I have some student loans from USC that 2 I’m paying off. So I thought if I’m at home and I’m paying off student loans, I’m wasting this education.” After four and a half months of taking care of Corinne full time, Garber worked out a half-time schedule with the dean of the school where she had worked for five years. “I love being at home with Corinne. I loved being a mom, but I missed my projects. I missed having something structured to do,” Garber said. I work a lot with community health projects and we are constantly doing events to help pregnant teens or…children under 5 who don’t have insurance, people with HIV and I missed that.” However, calling Garber’s part-time schedule the best of both worlds is akin to calling rocket science a hobby. As soon she came back from maternity leave Garber noticed a change; co-workers began to treat her differently, and her boss tried to force her out for having family commitments. Her supervisor moved her out of her large, private office to a small, shared one. She was assigned to a new supervisor, and some of her projects were taken away, all without her knowledge or consent. Co-workers would also speak to her in condescending tones of voice and make comments about her work ethic and new schedule. Garber said she felt like her supervisors’ attitudes were “her priorities aren’t with us anymore but we can’t fire her, so we’ll force her to leave.” Things became unbearable for Garber in early January when Corinne came down with a bad cold. Garber’s pregnancy had been very difficult. Early in her first trimester she 3 almost lost the baby and was ordered to four weeks of bed rest. As a result, she had no sick days left. When she took the day off to nurse Corinne, her boss took the hours out of her paycheck. “Instead of saying let’s make up the time, let’s work from home, I wasn’t given the option,” Garber said. “I just got cc’ed on an email from human resources to dock my pay for the day and that to me was very punitive and a little on the side of ridiculous.” If the Working Families Flexibility Act had been in place, Garber would have been protected from the disciplinary actions of her boss. The bill was introduced into the U.S. of House of Representatives in December of 2007 and would guarantee employees of large businesses the right to request a flexible working arrangement. It would also protect them from any sort of retaliation from their employers. Garber has also had to deal with criticism from friends and family about her decision to work part time. Because she is straddling two worlds, she gets judged negatively by stay- at-home moms and people who work full time. Co-workers in particular gave her a hard time about her reduced schedule. “And then vice-versa I got a lot of pressure from family members to stay home 100 percent,” Garber said. “They would say things like ‘you can find a way, Brian makes enough money, you don’t have to go back to work. Good moms stay at home.’ You sort of get it from both sides.” 4 Garber felt pressure from so many stay-at-home moms that she stopped attending her bible study and Junior League meetings. “Those women, they’re older, their husbands are more established,” Garber said. My husband and I are just starting out in our careers and we can’t afford the private schools, yet.” Garber’s mother, Caria Peyton, who was a stay-at-home mom to Garber and her two siblings thinks “it’s best if women stay home” to raise their children, Garber said. “I heard that from her when I was pregnant,” Garber said. However, Peyton said she supports her daughter’s choice to work. “I see it as a necessity. It takes more than one income nowadays,” Peyton said. Garber started a new job at University of Southern California in January. Research Says More Moms Favor Part-time A 2007 study by the Pew Research Center found 60 percent of working mothers believe that working part time will create the best family situation, while only one in five say working full time is ideal. Among stay-at-home mothers, only 16 percent chose full time as the best working situation. This is a departure from its 1997 study, which found that 48 percent of working moms wanted a part-time schedule. More moms may want to work part time, but it is hard to make it to the next day never mind the next quarter. Not only are working moms generally the main caretakers in their 5 homes, they also do the majority of the housework and often have to prove themselves to male colleagues. Pamela Johnston is a financial director at Pricewaterhouse Coopers and another mother who sees part-time work as the best solution. She has three children and works three days a week or about 30 to 35 hours. When Johnston had her twin girls, now 4 years old, she stayed home for eight months and found the transition back to work to be difficult. To make the shift smoother when she had her son, now 3 years old, she took a year off and practiced being away from her kids a little bit at a time. “I started taking my children to childcare roughly a few months before I went back to work so I could ease them into it,” Johnston said. “I would drop them off for a couple of hours.” Johnston was one of the first moms to take advantage of a flexible schedule at her Pricewaterhouse Coopers office and then got flak for it from some of her male colleagues. “They would say things like, you only work three days a week or oh you work at home… well no I don’t- I work my butt off so be quiet,” Johnston said. Pricewaterhouse Coopers was voted as one of “Working Mother Magazine’s” Best Companies for Working Mothers. Its family-friendly policies include a generous leave option allowing birth and adoptive mothers to take up to 12 weeks off, nine of them paid. 6 Employees also have the opportunity to create a flexible schedule or telecommute and work from home. Although Pricewaterhouse Coopers does not offer on-site daycare, it does offer its employees emergency back up daycare through another childcare center. If something comes up or their childcare provider doesn’t show, parents have the option of leaving their children at the center. One of Pricewaterhouse Cooper’s newest offerings for parents is the Full Circle Program initiated this year. It allows an employee to take up to five years off to raise a family and provides a coach to keep her abreast of industry changes. The company also offers Women’s Circles and Parenting Circles, mentoring and support groups that can be attended from home via web cast. Garber and Johnston may have had to prove themselves to colleagues after becoming mothers and opting for less-demanding schedules, but they are fortunate because their salaries and husbands’ salaries allow them to have choices. There are many mothers who would like to work part time but aren’t able to for financial reasons. Many women cannot even afford to take advantage of the paltry maternity leave that is available to them. Lack of Support System As of now, the only law the U.S. has that deals with working family issues is the Federal Family and Medical Leave Act. It requires businesses with 50 or more workers to give employees 12 weeks of unpaid leave for personal illness, the serious illness of a child, spouse or parent or to care for a new child. However, many people cannot afford to take advantage of the law. In fact, 78 percent of those people who wanted to take time off through The Family and Medical Leave Act but opted not to, simply could not afford to 7 go so long without a paycheck, according to the National Partnership for Women and Families. This means women sometimes have to choose between bonding with their baby or providing for it. When women have babies it often triggers a huge spell of poverty, said Steffany Stern, a policy analyst for the National Partnership for Women and Families. In the first few months of life, babies need numerous vaccinations and health check ups. For women who have to work during the day a trip to the doctor’s office may mean missing a day’s pay-or worse. Stern recently spoke with a woman who was fired from Whole Foods for leaving her shift early to take her 3-year-old son to undergo emergency surgery. “There are lots of people that are just not able to weather these storms of family illness and having babies, and the problems are more catastrophic than they’ve been in other generations,” Stern said. In Canada, mothers receive one year of paid leave. This has reduced first-year healthcare costs so much that there is a movement to extend the leave to two years, said Katie Bethell, of Moms Rising, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit organization that focuses on working mothers issues. “We just don’t have workplace protections in place right now that meet the needs of today’s families,” Stern said. 8 Mothers in California have slightly more protection. California has its own Family and Medical Leave Act, which gives workers up to six weeks of paid leave. It is funded through employee payroll deductions to the state’s disability insurance fund and pays 55 percent of employee’s wages up to $882 per week. Washington is the only other state that offers similar protection, according to the Paid Family Leave Collaborative. However, most people cannot live on that income alone. Taking care of a baby costs $785 a month, according to the nonprofit educational organization Campaign for Our Children, Inc. Moreover, only one in 10 women nationwide has access to paid family and medical leave and more than 90 percent of workers do not have access to a single, paid sick day, according to the National Partnership for Women and Families. Compounding the problem is the fact that Americans are working more than ever before. “The number of parents working during the evenings, nights and weekends is on the rise,” according to the Families and Work Institute. In 1977, women worked an average of 39 hours a week, while in 2002 it was 43.4 hours. Mothers worked an average of 41.2 hours a week in 2002. Men went from working 47 hours a week in 1977 to 49 in 2002. Fathers worked an average of 50.4 hours a week in 2002. Dual earner couples worked an average of 81 hours in 1977 and 91 hours in 2002, according to data collected by the Work and Families Institute. 9 Today, more moms are in the workforce than ever before. In the U.S., the female share of the labor force increased from 32 percent to 46 percent between 1960 and 2000. More women may want to work, but those who do not are sometimes forced into it because they feel it is impossible to raise children on one income. Crying at Work The Santa Monica Working Mothers Support Group meets weekly to discuss parenting and breastfeeding. The five moms who make up the core group all work full time; none of them would do so given the choice. All have professional jobs, mostly in the entertainment and software industries, and all have husbands who work. At a recent meeting, they spoke at length about the transition from being with their babies all day to spending most of their waking time at work. “I cried the whole way to work,” said Christina, who did not want to be identified by her last name. She has a 19-month-old son. All the moms recalled crying during their morning commutes for the first few months of going back to work. “Your whole heart is poured into this little person,” Christina said. The support group moms said what they want most is a minimum of six months paid maternity leave. A close second would be the option of having a reduced schedule. Delicia Delgardo has been with Pricewaterhouse Coopers for 10 years. After giving birth to her son, who was born prematurely, she took off four months to be with him. For the 10 weeks she wasn’t eligible for paid leave through Pricewaterhouse Coopers, she collected 55 percent of her wages through California’s partial leave policy. Now her son is 17 months old and she works 50 hours a week. But that is nothing compared to the 12 hour to 14 hour days she used to put in. “Before my son, I thought I was so busy and then when you have a child you realize I had so much free time,” Delgardo said. Her husband’s schedule is unpredictable and he travels frequently. With no family around to fill in the gaps, she must be ruthlessly organized to get her son to and from daycare on time. Otherwise she is charged a dollar per minute. She uses weekends to lay out their clothes and make meals ahead of time, so weekdays are “as fixed an exercise as possible.” “Being a mom demands that you’re strategic about how you spend your time,” Delgardo said. “[You] ask yourself at night, what do I need to accomplish tomorrow?” As much as she enjoys her job, Delgardo said she wants to work part time. However, she does not feel that it is financially viable. “What’s important to me is creating a path for my son. That helps me focus when the going gets tough,” Delgardo said. “In a perfect world, I would work part time, but my perfect world isn’t for two years-my ultimate vision [is that] two years from now I’ll go part time.” 11 Delgardo said that even with all the planning in the world, there are times when doing it all becomes overwhelming. ”There are days where I’m just crying. I will sit in my car bawling, how am I gonna get this done, make this work,” Delgardo said. After a 40-plus-hour work week and multiple hours spent commuting, there is barely enough time to pack a lunchbox, never mind engage in quality time. That’s why moms like Delgardo would be good candidates for telecommuting, at least part of the day, so they could work around their children’s schedules. Moreover, a minimum six months of paid maternity leave would guarantee their babies receive adequate care during their most formative months. Is Help Coming? In December 2007, the U.S. House of Representative introduced a bill that would offer families the option of creating a more flexible schedule. The Working Family Flexibility Act would allow workers to request a flexible schedule from their employers without fear of retaliation. The bill is based on a similar one that was passed in the United Kingdom and has had great success. However, the bill would not guarantee that workers would be granted the request. It would be within the employer’s rights to reject the offer but requires that they explain the grounds for their denial. Small businesses would be exempt. The bill, which is sponsored by Sen. Barrack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton, is still in committee, and it is too early to see how much momentum it will gain. 12 Stern calls it a step in the right direction, but said it is just a part of a solution that needs to be much larger and comprehensive. Longer paid leave and guaranteed health insurance are also necessities. The question remains: why does the richest country in the world gives such little support to its working mothers? One theory is that as a nation we are simply stuck in the past. “In this country, we only have systems to support a 1950s concept of family. Most employers operate under an assumption that one parent is working and one is not,” Bethell of Moms Rising said. “Unfortunately, our labor laws were designed decades and decades ago when the family model was a little different,” said Stern of the National Partnership for Women and Families. Stern added that the business lobby is always at the table when law makers are considering family friendly policies. Many business advocate organizations including the U.S. Chamber of Congress and the National Federation of Independent Businesses oppose government-required paid family leave because they don’t want to pay for it, Stern said. They say it is the responsibility of the individual businesses. However, Stern said that with the exception of a few elite companies who offer family-friendly policies to compete for high-level employees in an international market, American corporations are not very good about supporting American families. 13 “In the absence of a law requiring employers to do it they really haven’t stepped up,” she said. “We as a nation very much value our economy over our workforce and sometimes sacrifice our families and our communities for the sake of getting ahead. It’s a uniquely American thing.” Deborah Epstein Harry, president and founder of Flex Time Lawyers, said that employers are not convinced it is in their business interest to support flexible work schedules. “They still view it as an accommodation,” Harry said. “If they think it’s about accommodation then they’re really not going to be that receptive in the long run to making it work.” Yet there is plenty of evidence that supporting providing paid family leave and flexible work schedules, makes good sense from a business standpoint. Work family policies benefit employers by increasing worker retention. Stern notes that turnover costs can be astronomical, costing up to 25 percent of an employee’s annual salary to hire and train a new worker. “Loss of productivity is extremely costly,” Stern said. “When you have policies in place that allow workers to do their jobs and also take care of their families without having to leave the workforce, it’s always in the best interest of the company’s bottom line.” In short, family friendly policies lead to higher morale and happier, more loyal workers. They also lead to healthier families. 14 Full Time and Full Steam Part 1 Maris Friedman and Wretha Duncan are Pricewaterhouse Coopers employees and mothers who are devoted to their jobs and their families. However, to get from point a to point b in their hectic lives, they must be constantly moving and handing off caretaking to third parties. Friedman works 45 hours to 50 hours a week in the tax department at Pricewaterhouse Coopers. While she and her husband, who is also a high-level executive, work they have a nanny to watch their 2-year-old and 4-year-old sons. They come home between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. and have dinner together as a family. After they put the kids to bed, it’s back to work, a seemingly common arrangement for working families. “You know we have instant messaging for our firm, if you go online at like 8:30 p.m., 9:00 p.m., it’s all working mothers,” Friedman said. “So a lot of us do the same thing, that’s what works for us.” Maris Friedman started a group for new mothers at Pricewaterhouse Coopers to ease the transition. She connects with the mothers she mentors before they take maternity leave, and together they set up a plan for how much contact to maintain while on leave as well as a time line for when they will be back to work. For the first few weeks they are back in the office Friedman meets with them at least once a week. After that, she makes an effort to keep in touch and make sure they know someone is looking out for them. 15 “PWC is totally into working mothers right now so they do have a lot of programs like flexible schedules, part time, telecommuting… So we spend a lot of time talking about that,” Friedman said. Before becoming a mom, Friedman usually worked 60 hours to 80 hours a week. She said that part of what made the transition back to work difficult for her was the tension between wanting to cut back her hours and wanting to continue her professional trajectory. “You always wanna achieve, achieve, achieve, move to the next level, move to the next level,” Friedman said. “Part of what I see with every single new mother that comes back in is strong feelings of guilt, not just over spending time with their kids but over the inability to work at the same level as what they did prior to having kids. A lot of the coaching that I ended up doing was validating that it’s ok for [them] not to work way up here-[they] can bring it down a notch and still be successful here.” However, Friedman admits that following her own advice is difficult. “The same coaching that I do for all these other mothers, its very hard for me to be able to take my work down a notch, too,” Friedman said. Full Time and Full Steam Part II Wretha Duncan is one full-time working mom who was happy to get back to work, though she said she would rather work part time. Her 13-month-old daughter goes to 16 daycare while she puts in five, 10-hour days a week working as an IT person at Pricewaterhouse Coopers. “I got pregnant at 39…I’m an older mother and I’ve been working a lot longer, so my transition was easy because I missed being at work,” Duncan said. “[My daughter] wasn’t doing all that much, and she wasn’t really missing me. She didn’t know me from Adam. I was ready to come back to work.” Duncan follows a grueling schedule that starts at 4 a.m. and barely leaves time for sleep, let alone housework or “me time.” However, she cooks dinner every night because her husband works 12 hour days and needs a good meal. She is happy with her arrangement but says there is still more her employer could do. “If there was daycare so I could see my baby during the day, I think that would make it a lot easier for me at work,” Duncan said. “Because I wouldn’t have to focus on her so much. I could go see her…she’s ok, [then] I could go back to work.” While both Friedman and Duncan are committed to their families, they work a minimum of 50 hours a week. That means that most of their children’s waking hours are spent in the company of other people. Both have spouses and work for one of the most family- friendly companies in the country. For those women who have neither of those benefits, their family time is even more limited. 17 What’s Best for Baby Whether to make ends meet, pay for a certain lifestyle or fulfill a professional goal, moms are working more than ever before. In 2002, mothers worked an average of 41.2 hours a week. That is a lot when you also have the full time job of being a parent. Those jammed-packed, impossibly productive days may not be in anyone’s best interest. Research shows that children and parents fare better when they can spend a significant amount of time together. Providing parental leave and offering flex time leads to healthier children as it makes it easier for mothers to breastfeed, immunize their children and provide general caretaking duties, “all of which contribute to lower infant mortality and morbidity rates,” according to the Families and Work Institute. Janette Yeoffe, a marriage and family therapist specializing in children who have attachment issues, says that babies who are not able to bond with their parents are at risk for having certain emotional and learning issues later in life. “If a child does not have an attachment to a caretaker and they have multiple caretakers, then they can have an attachment disorder later in life,” Yeoffe said. “They won’t know who to attach to and they’ll form indiscriminant attachments.” A child that forms indiscriminate attachments will not know who to trust and will approach strangers to be picked up. They will go through life “overtrusting,” Yeoffe said. 18 “They’ll go to the first person who’s there regardless if they’re safe or not,” Yeoffe said. “It forms out of an anxiety, of not knowing what’s safe and what’s not safe.” In addition, if children don’t bond to an adult they can have auditory processing delays. “They have difficulty processing information…if in their early life they haven’t had a caretaker to teach them how to regulate themselves and their emotional states,” Yeoffe said. Children that don’t have consistent parenting have trouble regulating their emotions and are less able to concentrate and think logically, Yeoffe said. For the families that are not able to spend most of the day with their babies for the first nine months of their lives, Yeoffe recommends making the best of the time they have. “If you’re gonna be physically separate for most of the day, you need to be physically close for those two hours you are able to spend with them,” Yeoffe said. “Parents are working so much that they don’t have time to be in that playful mode with the child because they’re always doing, doing doing.Its hard to really get in tune with your child’s internal timeclock, but the challenge is to be with child as opposed to always doing with the child.” Dead Last in the Western World There is no doubt that in terms of family friendly policies, Pricewaterhouse Coopers is far ahead of most other American companies that offer no flexibility or paid leave. However, even their benefits pale in comparison to those offered in other countries. Out of a study 19 that included 173 countries, 169 offered paid maternity leave and 98 offer 14 weeks or more, according to “2007 Work, Family, and Equity Index: Where Does the United States Stand Globally?,” a study conducted by the Institute for Health and Social Policy at McGill University. As the U.S. guarantees no paid maternity leave it was left “in the company of only three other nations: Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland,” according to the study. Many countries offer 100 percent paid leave; France offers between 12 and 16 weeks, Spain offers 16 weeks and Germany offers 14 weeks. Canada’s Employment Insurance (EI) offers 15 weeks of paid maternity leave and 35 weeks of paid parental leave for a total of 50 weeks at 55 percent pay, according to INFACT Canada: the Infant Feeding Action Coalition. Norway is by far the most evolved, offering the choice of 52 weeks of parental leave with 80 percent pay or 42 weeks with 100 percent pay, according to a report funded by the Status of Women Canada, a federal organization that deals with women’s issues. Norwegian parents also have the option of using their parental leave to work for between half and 90 percent time for up until two years, according to the report. In addition, each parent may take an additional unpaid year of leave. The only eligibility requirements are that the mother must have been employed for six out of the 10 months before giving birth, according to the report. 20 “The only other industrialized country which does not have paid maternity or parental leave, Australia, guarantees a full year of unpaid leave to all women in the country,” said Steffany Stern, a policy analyst for the National Partnership for Women and Families. As of now, there is no bill in sight that would force companies to offer paid family leave. “There is a resistance in this country to conforming to European ideals, but it’s based on a misconception that Europe has suffered economically because of its comprehensive welfare state,” Stern said. “European economies are really thriving and unemployment rates are down. All the negative indicators that made Americans hesitant really aren’t the case anymore.” Garber said that the reason she thinks U.S. policy is so inhospitable to working families is that decision makers rarely walk a mile in a mommy’s shoes. “Unfortunately, the corporate world is still very much a man’s world, and most men don’t stay home and raise children so they don’t know what it takes,” Garber said. “They don’t know the energy that’s expended, they don’t know that you’re the CEO of the household and a chauffeur and a nurse and a doctor…even husbands who are involved and good husbands don’t have a clue, god bless them, they don’t have a clue.” When It All Works Out Despite the lack of family-friendly government policies, with the right support and the right employer, it is possible for mothers to strike a balance that allows career fulfillment and enough time to raise a family. 21 In early January 2007, Garber found a new job within the University of Southern California School of Dentistry where she feels it is possible to succeed, even as a part- time mom. She has a babysitter who takes care of Corinne during her two, 10-hour days at the office, as well as the half day she works from home. Her husband of four years, a sales manager for Universal Studios, comes home from work at 5:30 to relieve the baby sitter on days she works. They have dinner together even when they need to work from home in the evening. Nearby family occasionally fills in the gaps. Garber’s new boss is supportive and her new colleagues do not resent her flexible schedule. “It’s a good arrangement,” she said. “It’s working for now.” 22 Bibliography Bethell, Katie, Moms Rising. Personal Interview. 14 November 2007. Bond, James T. “2005 National Study of Employers.” Families and Work Institute 6 September 2005 <http://familiesandwork.org/site/research/summary/2005nsesumm.pdf> Brooks, Shelli, Pricewaterhouse Coopers. Personal Interview. 6 November 2007. Campaign For Our Children, Inc. “A Baby Costs $785 a Month Lesson Plan.” Campaign For Our Children.org. 12 January 2008 <http://www.cfoc.org/ABabyCosts$785aMonth/> Christina (preferred not to give last name). Personal Interview. 17 November 2007. DeBare, Ilana. “3 bills try to bloster California’s family leave law” San Francisco Chronicle 5 October 2007. 12 January 2008 <http://www.sfgate.com/cgibin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/05/MN6OSIMJM.DTL> Delgardo, Delicia, Pricewaterhouse Coopers. Personal Interview. 20 October 2007. Duncan, Wretha, Pricewaterhouse Coopers. Personal Interview. 6 November 2007. Friedman, Maris, Pricewaterhouse Coopers. Personal Interview. 6 November 2007. Garber, Kimberly. Personal Interview. 21 November 2007, 18 January 2008. Harris, Rose, 9 to 5. Personal Interview. 22 January 2008. Harry, Deborah Epstein, Flextime Lawyers. Personal Interview. 22 January 2008. Heymann, Jody. “The Work, Family, and Equity Index: Where Does the United States Stand Globally?” The Project on Global Working Families, The Institute for Health and Social Policy February 2007. 2 January 2008 <http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/globalworkingfamilies/images/report.pdf> Infant Feeding Action Coalition: Fall 2005 Newsletter. Infant Feeding Action Coalition. INFACT Canada: The Infant Feeding Action Coalition.ca 14 January 2008 <http://www.infactcanada.ca/newsletter_fall_2005_pg01.htm> Johnston, Pamela, Pricewaterhouse Coopers. Personal Interview. 6 November 2007. 23 Lund, Kirstin. “International Best Practices for Maternity and Parental Benefits.” Status of Women Canada. 14 January 2008 <http://www.multiplebirthscanada.org/english/documents/MaritimeCanada.pdf> NationalPartnershipforWomen&Families “Facts About the FMLA: What Does It Do, Who Uses It, & How.” National Partnership for Women and Families. 12 January 2008 <http://www.nationalpartnership.org/site/DocServer/FMLAWhatWhoHow.pdf?docID=9 65> NewYorkTimes.com: “Paid Leave for Maternity Is the Norm, Except in…” New York Times. 6 October 2007. 12 January 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/06/business/06instincts.html?_r=1&oref=slogin> PaidFamilyLeave.org: Other States. PaidFamilyLeave.org. 12 January 2008 <http://www.paidfamilyleave.org/otherstates.html> Peyton, Caria. Personal Interview. 21 January 2008. Ruiz, Martha, Pricewaterhouse Coopers. Personal Interview. 6 November 2007. Stern, Steffany, National Partnership for Women and Families. Personal Interview. 17 January 2008. Yeoffe, Janette, Marriage and family therapist. Personal Interview. 16 January 2008.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract American working mothers face numerous and specialized challenges at work and at home. However, the U.S. government offers them little support.

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

Degas and his dance images as a form of New Media journalism

PDF

Speaking for peace: Muslims and Jews in dialogue

PDF

Meet Los Angeles' married Catholic priest

PDF

It’s a business: the influence of Christianity on the streets of Skid Row

PDF

The peril of acceptance: American Jewry assimilation trends 60 years after the holocaust

PDF

Americans embracing Islam

PDF

The Iraq war: legitimizing victim art

PDF

Scientology and the state: Narconon's influence in the prison system

PDF

Riverside County Emergency Treatment Services failing patients and doctors

PDF

The power of visual imagery and its role in public relations

PDF

The rise of Cape Town, South Africa’s fashion capital

PDF

Ivory dreams: the music critic as performer

PDF

The overlooked Latino middle class: deep roots and continued growth

PDF

Physicians' perceptions on the ethics of free drug samples

PDF

The British invasion of American television

PDF

Paparazzi

PDF

When the mighty fall. Pro athletes and the media: how to mitigate and manage a scandal

PDF

'Spiritual, but not religious': why Americans are abandoning religious institutions to pursue their own paths to the divine

PDF

Vérité, ecstatic truth, and history: the documentary styles of David & Albert Maysles, Werner Herzog, and Ken Burns

PDF

Ethanol: the billion-dollar harvest

Asset Metadata

Creator Kopas, Sasha Mary (author)

Core Title American working mothers and the possible part-time solution

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Journalism (Print Journalism)

Publication Date 04/25/2008

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Mothers,OAI-PMH Harvest

Place Name USA (countries)

Language English

Advisor Winston, Diane (committee chair), Kotler, Jonathan (committee member), Lutkehaus, Nancy (committee member)

Creator Email kopas@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1192

Unique identifier UC1306041

Identifier etd-Kopas-20080425 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-59596 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1192 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Kopas-20080425.pdf

Dmrecord 59596

Document Type Thesis

Rights Kopas, Sasha Mary

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu