Money Musings 💭 Cheers 🥂 to a New Year!
Happy New Year! 🥳
I hope you are doing something fun to celebrate! 🎊 I am so excited to join you on your money journey in 2021, whatever that may look like.
Tomorrow is the last official day of my maternity leave. I cannot wait to get back to work helping you get you wealthy.
If there are ways I can better support you in your goals or things you’d like to see from the Fiscal Femme in the coming year, I’m listening. Just hit reply and let me know.
Cheers to a wealthy New Year for all womxn and allies! 🥂
MONEY MOVE OF THE WEEK
Prioritize your goals. What comes first (and how many)? Whew! What a year... 🤯 Or really more like 😩🤦♀️😭. Despite all that happened (or didn’t happen) in 2020, before the New Year is a great time to revisit your financial goals. Maybe you achieved some of your goals this year, maybe some (if not all) went completely off the rails. That’s okay. There’s nothing like a fresh start. 🎬
Think about what you are working towards financially and what is most important. I like to prioritize one or two goals (meaning I only contribute to one or two goals at a time). This is definitely a choice that should be based on personal preference. It can be hard to narrow down our goals to what’s most important but if we prioritize (or put money towards) too many, it can feel like we’re making very little progress.
If you are looking for a group of amazing money buddies to share your 2021 goals, join us in the Fiscal Femme Slack Community. We can hold you accountable and cheer you on!
YOU GOTTA SEE THIS
Motherhood bias. I always knew that mothers faced discrimination. Before I had kids, I made a lot of incorrect assumptions about working parents, specifically working mothers. When I had E, I started to experience it firsthand. For the first time, people started to assume my business was more of a hobby. I’d get questions like “are you working on the Fiscal Femme full-time?” or “I assume you can’t come to this event because you want to get home to your child.”
Bias towards working mothers is real and documented. Mothers are often viewed as less competent and committed to their jobs. This seeps into hiring practices, formal and informal job evaluations, and women are more often overlooked for challenging assignments and promotions because it’s assumed they have less time and ambition.
In a 2007 study, mothers interviewed were only recommended for hire 47% of the time, while non-mothers with similar job applications and qualifications were recommended for hire 84% of the time. Not only that, moms were offered $11K less in salary than non-moms for the same position (the pay gap for moms is $0.70 and is far worse for moms of color).
Fathers on the other hand, did not receive this type of penalty and actually fared better than men who were not fathers. We even see this happening now in the pandemic. Dads have been 3x as likely as moms to get a promotion working from home during the pandemic and 2x as likely to get a pay raise.
Researchers believe that a lot of this bias comes from the belief that it’s the father’s job to earn money and it’s the mother’s job to look after the home and family. It also has a lot to do with the unequal burden of unpaid labor in the home (dads get 2x as much uninterrupted work time during the day as moms when WFH).
In order to retain and advance working mothers’ careers, organizations have a responsibility to create unbiased hiring and evaluation practices. We as individuals have a responsibility to become aware of our own bias in and outside the workplace.