“Being mom could be a six-figure job,” one of the top headlines on CNN’s homepage teased this morning. We were intrigued — had CNN figured out a solution to the age-old economic inequity of motherhood? Could post-feminist American women, torn between a career and the desire to have children, now have their cake and get paid well for eating it too?
“Raising children to be productive members of society is an invaluable contribution. But you don’t get cold cash for that kind of work — this society values only those economic contributions one makes outside of the home,” CNNMoney.com senior staff writer Jeanne Sahadi advised.
Fortunately, such real-world considerations are hardly an obstacle when Salary.com has a new survey to tout giving the “market valuation of a mother’s work.” And it made for easy early-morning copy for CNNMoney.com, which sometimes acts as a rewrite wire service, or a free advertising site.
Salary.com, Sahadi explained, surveyed 400 stay-at-home and working moms as it determined the 10 major jobs an average mother performs at home and how many hours she typically spends on each. What they found was remarkable: mothers spend a lot of time cooking and cleaning!
But CNNMoney.com’s real hook was another Salary.com finding, this one even more shocking.
“Researchers then tried to determine the competitive market value that an employer would pay for one person to do a blend of those 10 jobs seven days a week,” Sahadi wrote. They figured out that the average stay-at-home mom, working 92 hours a week at 10 different “jobs,” could actually earn “as much as $134,121 for her contributions as a housekeeper, cook, day care center teacher, janitor and CEO”!
Amazing. But we wonder, who would pay Mom to raise her own kids? And if we are just playing games, why not compare Mom to a crooked hedge fund manager (they both do a lot of laundering), or the King of Brunei (both worshipped by their people)? That way Mom could get a higher salary.
Then there are the metaphysical questions. Like, who cares? And, why is CNNMoney.com printing Salary.com’s silly marketing gimmick as news?
Luckily for us, CNNMoney.com did some journalistic probing, and discovered that, lo, there was an aspect of the survey that did not completely jibe with reality.
“Salary.com’s senior vice president of compensation, Bill Coleman, acknowledges that the inclusion of CEO as a function might skew the estimated pay for a mother’s work toward the high end …,” Sahadi wrote. “Running a household is more comparable, perhaps, to a top manager’s job — a manager who in the workforce might make in the low six figures.”
Well, at least we now understand why editors don’t make the big bucks. But coming a mere 11 days in advance of Mother’s Day, we’ll give CNN the benefit of the doubt and assume that there was, in fact, some point to this headlong rush into hypothetical la-la land.
We love you, Mom.
Now show us the money.
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.