When I was a kid my parents worked weekends. My dad at his second job and my mom worked nights in a hospital. They worked their schedules out so that every other weekend my two younger sisters and I spent the weekend with my grandma. This allowed my grandmother to have a lot of influence on me. She tried to convince my younger sister and I that our beloved cousins in San Antonio never fought; unlike us who held championship matches almost every day. But the one lesson that stuck with me, even if I didn’t live it, was this – Boys can wait, education first, get a job, and then find a boyfriend.

Michelle Obama certainly lead her life with this mantra, that is until she met Barack. “Michelle was full of plans that day, on the fast track, with no time, she told me, for distractions — especially men.” He has freely admitted that Michelle is the one who put her career on a mommy-track (not that her career looks anything like the typical mommy-track, mind you, just next to Barack’s career) for the kids sake, for his career sake. And now she is to be the next First Lady.

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I know this is a site for working moms, but since Father’s Day is this weekend, I thought we could turn our attention to our (mostly) better halves. I’ve always found it interesting that in all the debates about mommy wars and mommy guilt, little has been said or discussed about how dads feel about working and family. This week, however, I did run across this survey put out by CareerBuilder.com which states an interesting fact about dads surveyed.

More than a third of working dads (37 percent) said they would leave their job if their spouse or significant other’s income could comfortably support the entire family, similar to last year’s findings.

Wow, who knew? Some dads want to stay home too? I’m only being half-serious here. Some people may be surprised by these results, but I’m not. Almost on a weekly basis my husband tells me he’d happily stay at home with our son if I was willing to work and support our family. Sometimes, I think he should be the one to stay at home full time. His instincts are flawless when it comes to taking care of our son.

But I so don’t have what it takes to be a full-time working mom with a high-pressure career that brings fulfillment and the bacon.

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This article in the Wall Street Journal my friend Kim sent me caught my eye mainly because of its title, “How Stay-at-Home Moms Are Filling an Executive Niche.” Now that my working mom status has changed, I pay close attention to how the media covers stay-at-home moms. Especially when the topic has anything to do with stay-at-home moms re-entering the workforce. In this particular article, the author, Sue Shellenbarger, focuses on a topic of particular interest to me - moms who take on small projects to stay up on current business trends.

Shellenbarger states:

The decision among some highly educated women to stay home with children is sparking a countertrend: The rise of the mommy “SWAT team.” The acronym, for “smart women with available time,” is one mother’s label for all-mom teams assembled quickly through networking and staffing firms to handle crash projects. Employers get lots of voltage, cheap, while the women get a skills update and a taste of the professional challenges they miss.

I get this concept. I too, feel that I’m a highly educated woman who likes to network and handle small, last-minute projects. I try to stay in the mix as often as possible so that I can mingle with adults from time-to-time and keep my mind fresh. I’m pretty sure in four years, an executive won’t care if I can recite the theme song to “Dora the Explorer.”

However, I’m bothered by one of the themes of the article overall - that highly educated stay-at-home moms can be bought for consulting work for “cheap” because the chance to get refreshed on current business trends and dip our toes in professional challenges makes up for the money.

Shellenbarger highlights the “cheap” cost of using SAHMs in corporate work:

The University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School was able to muster an “incredibly talented” team with eight at-home mothers — including a Stanford University Ph.D… The team taught leadership skills to 100 M.B.A. candidates…[and the] training was so successful that enrollment doubled this spring and Kenan-Flagler made it mandatory for leadership training. Cost to the B-school: $21 an hour per woman.

Twenty-one dollars per hour? And one of the women leading the training has her Ph.D? I might as well go get a job at Costco and work a few overtime shifts. I guess my master’s degree isn’t worth as much as I thought if I don’t keep it in practice.

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The basis for tome’s like Linda Hirshman‘s Get To Work and Lisa Bennett’s Feminine Mistake may appear to be nothing more than telling women what to do but if you can ignore the horrible presentation, the real issue is that Hirshman, Bennett and others are seriously tired of seeing women make up the majority of those living in poverty. Not just making up a large percentage, but that women end up there because we take time out of work to care for our family members.

* Women comprise 56% of Americans over 18 who live in poverty. [cite]
* In 2004, 28.4 percent of households headed by single women were poor. [cite]
* Nearly two-thirds of white women who are poor in old age have not been poor in the earlier years. This demonstrates an increased risk or a newly emerging risk of poverty for many white women. [cite]
* Old age poverty for African-American women reflects economic disadvantages in their earlier years compared with white women. [cite]
* In the United States, the share of elderly women living in poverty is highest among divorced or separated women (37 percent), followed by widowed women (28 percent), never-married women (22 percent), and married women (10 percent). [cite]

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