This.

I’m a bit of an anomaly in that becoming a mother significantly improved my financial situation, but only because I opted not to run for re-election and got a job that paid full-time wages for full-time work.

This is another piece of the motherhood penalty - leaving work you love because it’s unsustainable.

Whether it’s stress, a lack of flexibility, workplace culture, or being denied a raise that would be commensurate with the fatherhood bonus, many workplaces throw up barriers to mothers that sideline them not because they intend to (well, that too), but because of an adherence to outdated norms established decades ago by men in leadership who were never expected to “balance” much of anything in this regard.

Finding employment that has both the infrastructure and culture to truly allow mothers to thrive at work and at home (meaning it’s tangible and not just in a policy on a shelf somewhere) is still like finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, only it isn’t luck, it’s self-advocacy, something I wrote about it in “Moms don't have flexible jobs, they make their jobs flexible”: allisonhiltz.substack.c…

To say there is so much work to do is an understatement and I recommend giving Stefanie O’Connell a follow.