Alison Channon, Program Assistant

This blog post is a part of NWLC’s Mother’s Day 2012 blog series. For all our Mother’s Day posts, please click here.

My whole life, whenever I would thank my mom for doing something for me (or on those few occasions when I might grumble that she was being a little overprotective), she would always respond, “that’s what they pay me for.”

What she was really saying is that picking me up from school in the middle of the day because I was sick, or helping me with homework assignments, or asking if I was eating enough calcium (yes, Mom) was all part of being a parent. But I know that no one ever paid my mom to mother, even though it is hard and extremely expensive work.

So while there was no motherhood bureau paying my mom for raising her daughters, her employer was paying her a living wage with benefits.

Unfortunately, not every mother receives a living wage or benefits like paid vacation time to attend parent-teacher conferences and school plays, or health insurance to care for themselves and their children. Between the gender wage gap, the concentration of women in low-paying jobs, and a slow economic recovery for women, too many moms are parenting on nickels and dimes.

The millions of women who lived in poverty in 2010 aren’t thrilled about it, neither are the hundreds of thousands of women who lost their public sector jobs in the last two years, but a large portion of Congress doesn’t seem to care about struggling families.

Tuesday, the New York Times published another article in its “Female Factor” series entitled “Women Bearing the Brunt of Austerity in Britain.” As you might imagine, reading it was like déjà vu. In the United Kingdom, like in the United States, budget cuts have caused stagnant wages and layoffs in the public sector, and cuts to vital programs like child care and pensions. And unsurprisingly, women are hit hardest.

Over the course of the recovery in this country, which officially began in June of 2009, we’ve reported on the public sector job losses that have especially hurt women. Our most recent numbers show that women, who make up 57 percent of the public workforce, have lost an even larger share of the hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs lost during the recovery.

Like American women, British women are overrepresented in the public sector – they comprise two-thirds of the workforce – so they are more likely to be affected by public sector cuts. The British government’s Office for Budget Responsibility predicts the public sector will likely lose an additional 710,000 jobs in the next five years, which will hurt women’s employment further.