Ted S. Warren / AP file

The value of a mother's work has decreased since Jenna Kagan homeschooled her then 6-year-old son Hunter. Taking care of house and family would cost roughly $59,000 to have someone else do, a research group found using government data.

If moms earned wages for the work they do around the house and with the kids, they’d be getting a pay cut this year.

The take-home pay that a mother would earn for everything from cooking to handling the family finances would total at $59,862 if she were paid on the open market, according to Insure.com’s analysis of government data on hourly wages.

That’s down from $60,182 in 2012 and $61,436 in 2011, Insure.com’s annual Mother’s Day Index shows.

The drop is because typical wages for some domestic jobs have fallen, said Amy Danise, a spokeswoman for Insure.com.

The Mother’s Day Index tallies 14 jobs that moms might perform, including cooking, driving, cleaning and taking care of the kids, and then looks at Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data for those tasks. Danise said the website compiled its list by brainstorming about typical mothers’ tasks, and coming up with a typical number of hours she might spend on them.

By Insure.com’s tally, a mom’s average work week would be significantly longer than 40 hours - although most moms would probably also agree that parenting requires far longer hours than your average desk job.

The total does not include the wages that moms earn for paid work they do outside the home. 

The Insure.com data is not meant to be a rigorous analysis of the value of domestic work.

“It’s more like a fun way of looking at serious topic,” Danise said.

But some economists have taken a more serious look at the value of housework. A report released last year by the government’s Bureau of Economic Analysis found that adding “nonmarket household production” to the nation’s gross domestic product would have raised nominal GDP by 39 percent in 1965 and 26 percent in 2010.

That figure would include jobs such as cooking, cleaning and child care that both men and women do around the house.

The decline in the contribution to GDP is because the hours women spent on housework fell from 40 hours per week in 1965 to 26 hours per week in 2010, and more women entered the paid workforce. That more than offset the increase, from 14 hours in 1965 to 17 hours per week in 2010, that men spent on domestic tasks.

This story was originally published on Mon May 6, 2013 7:41 PM EDT

Pascal Lauener / Reuters

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg attends the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos in this January 25, 2013, file photo.

Ever since the world got wind of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s new book  “Lean In,” which landed on store shelves Monday, it’s been viewed as a sort of modern-day feminist manifesto of how women can get ahead in the corporate world.

And while it is that in many respects, it can also be seen as a good, common-sense approach to career advancement, for either gender.

Some academics are finding it's providing a good springboard for the discussion.

Pulin Sanghvi, assistant dean and director of the Career Management Center at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, said he liked Sandberg’s message of developing your own greatness on your own terms. Leaders are rewarded for their “spikiness,” he said, rather than their well-rounded skills.

Filled with studies to back up her anecdotes, Sandberg refrains from whining about workplace inequality. Instead, she offers dozens of techniques that can level the playing field faster.

She gives specific examples of changes that can be made by men (hire and promote women, share household chores with your spouse), companies (offer paid personal time off, engineer less rigid schedules) and government (support affordable child care). Mainly, however, it’s about how women (or men) can work the system even if it’s broken.

Here are some of Sandberg’s pointers:

• Seek a job at a fast-growing company because there will be more opportunities than at a place that is stagnant or shrinking. "If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don't ask what seat, you just get on," she writes that Google's then-CEO Eric Schmidt said in persuading her to work at the company.
• Pay attention and make your own opportunities. Sandberg writes that “increasingly, opportunities are not well defined but, instead, come from someone jumping in to do something. That something then becomes his job.”
• Don’t talk yourself out of applying for a job if you don’t have 100 percent of the skills. Sandberg cites a 2008 study at Hewlett-Packard that found women only apply for a job if they think they meet 100 percent of the criteria. Men apply if they think they meet 60 percent of the requirements. “I want to do that – and I’ll learn by doing it,” is the more successful mindset.
• Women may have to ask for a raise differently than men. Sandberg cites a study that shows women touting their own success are seen as pushy. One trick is to advocate for yourself as a strong member of a team that deserves the reward. Say, "We had a great year," versus, "I had a great year." Here, Sandberg explains a central point of her book: "I understand the paradox of advising women to change the world by adhering to biased rules and expectations," but it's a means to an end, she argues, and it won't always have to be this way.
• Prioritize. In her “Myth of Doing It All” chapter, Sandberg quotes Dr. Laura Glimcher, dean of Weill Cornell Medical College, who admits to not keeping her linens perfectly folded all the time. “I had to decide what mattered and what didn’t and I learned to be a perfectionist in only the things that mattered,” Glimcher said.
• Don’t ask a stranger to mentor you. Instead, ask smart questions to get noticed. In one example, Sandberg notices a junior employee leaving a conference room armed with a succinct, casual-sounding question for a manager. She also cites a woman she met at a conference, Clara Shih of Hearsay Social, who followed up with a series of short emails with thoughtful questions she could not get answered elsewhere.
• When starting out, think of child care costs as an investment. While you may only break even at the start, eventually your salary will rise, making the child care costs a smaller percentage of your paycheck.
• “Employees who concentrate on results and impact are the most valuable,” Sandberg writes. One example she uses is from Lori Goler, who was then the senior director of marketing at eBay. Her job pitch to Sandberg was basically, “What is your biggest problem and how can I solve it?” Goler was hired to run recruiting at Facebook.
• Get more sleep to become a better problem solver.

The auto industry has traditionally been male-dominated but Honda has rolled out a new model it claims to have specifically designed with women in mind.

The new Honda Fit She’s is a pretty-in-pink version of the maker’s familiar subcompact that offers a few niceties the maker believes will specifically appeal to distaff buyers, such as a windshield designed to block skin-wrinkling ultraviolet rays.

But will women actually care? While the new Honda subcompact may be the only car currently on the road specifically targeting women there’s a good reason.  Previous feminine offerings, such as the old Dodge LaFemme, met with little more than indifference and, in some cases, outright hostility.

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Priced at $17,500 – at current exchange rates – the Honda Fit She’s is currently available only in the Japanese market and it’s unclear whether the maker will roll it out in other parts of the world.

Like those vehicles handed out as prizes by Mary Kay Cosmetics, the dominant shade is pink, starting with the exterior paint and including the interior pink stitching and tutti-frutti-hued chrome bezels. If that doesn’t get the message across, Honda uses a pretty little heart to replace the apostrophe in “She’s.”

To Honda’s credit, the maker also has plans to offer the special model in an alternate hue that might best be called “eyeliner brown.”

The Fit She’s also delivers some other features women might appreciate.  That includes the special UV-blocking window glass.  Recent studies have underscored concerns that extended exposure to the sun while driving can be nearly as bad for the skin as spending too much time on the beach. 

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The Honda Fit She’s also features a “Plasmacluster” climate control system the maker claims can improve skin quality.

The decision to offer the car in the Japanese market isn’t all that much of a surprise considering the country’s more traditional sex-defined roles. As much as half of all Japanese women stay out of the workforce and still more tend to shift to homemakers after getting married. But even for those women who do join the workforce, there is  more of a divide in tastes than one might find in Western countries.

That has stifled efforts by European and U.S. manufacturers who previously tried to target products directly to women.  Chrysler, for one, thought it had a winner with the 1955 LaFemme. The sedan featured special storage places for hat and purse – and the driver’s seat swiveled to allow a woman wearing a skirt to enter or exit the vehicle with appropriate modesty.  Nonetheless, like the few other offerings openly aimed at American women over the years, LaFemme proved LaFlop.

One might think that the U.S. auto industry would be inspired by the Honda Fit She’s. After all, women now directly purchase over a third of the vehicles sold in the States, while data from J.D. Power and Associates suggests they “influence” as much as 60% of all vehicle purchases.

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Yet, just the hint of being a “woman’s car” can prove the kiss of death.  Despite their tremendous flexibility and functionality, minivans lost much of  their cache, noted Nissan marketing executive Tom Smith, when they become known as “soccer-mom vehicles.”  Chrysler tried to counter that image when it released its latest  version of the Dodge Durango by dubbing it the “man van,” but with little success.

Volkswagen blames the fall off in sales of the so-called “New Beetle” to the fact that the vehicle became known as a “chick car.” Jonathon Browning, head of Volkswagen Group of America, says the maker specifically wanted to make the latest version of the Beetle, introduced a year ago, “look more masculine.”

That doesn’t mean makers are ignoring the needs of women.  Both Ford and General Motors, among many makers, have established groups of women designers and engineers who specifically consider the features and attributes of new products looking for ways to appeal to feminine needs – and avoid problems that might not be apparent to their male colleagues.

That might include door handles that can snap off long fingernails. And a number of new vehicles now feature larger center storage bins able to handle a pocketbook – while men get the added benefit of being able to tuck away their iPads and other electronic goodies.

Some makers have also introduced new colors that they believe will have bigger appeal to women buyers – though whatever their sex, studies by paint suppliers like DuPont Automotive show that silver, black and white continue to dominate.

So, while automakers clearly want to win over women shoppers, few are likely to follow Honda’s lead, especially outside of Japan.  In most of the rest of the world, women car buyers just wanted to be treated as one of the guys.

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Hillary Clinton

Don’t even consider whining about or lamenting Hillary Clinton’s decision not to run for President in 2016 – she can’t stand whining.

The November issue of Marie Claire features an article with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton which highlights that she’s leaving her post in January and says she won’t be making another run at the White House. 

"I can't stand whining," Clinton told Marie Claire. "I can't stand the kind of paralysis that some people fall into because they're not happy with the choices they've made. You live in a time when there are endless choices ... Money certainly helps, and having that kind of financial privilege goes a long way, but you don't even have to have money for it. But you have to work on yourself ... Do something!" 

According to the New York Times, Clinton was responding to a question from the article's author, Ayelet Waldman, referring to J.D. Salinger's seminal book about teenage angst, "The Catcher in the Rye." The book's main character, 17-year-old Holden Caulfield, is one of the most enduring characters in American literature, partly because he is a symbol of teenage rebellion and disenchantment with becoming an adult. He is a child of privilege who is lashing out against the conventions of the grown-up world he is about to enter.

While Clinton may have a problem with privileged people whining about their choices, she does believe that workplaces should try to be flexible and accommodating for women. 

"It's important for our workplaces ... to be more flexible and creative in enabling women to continue to do high-stress jobs while caring for not only children, but [also] aging parents," Clinton said in the Marie Claire interview. 

Clinton has shown that, when it comes to motherhood and a successful career, some women can have it all. But, she acknowledges that it’s not without sacrifices. “I have been on this high wire of national and international politics and leadership for 20 years," Clinton told Marie Claire. "It has been an absolutely extraordinary personal honor and experience. But I really want to just have my own time back. I want to just be my own person. I'm looking forward to that." 

For now, it appears that Clinton won’t be our first female president, but she does hope to see that happen. “I hope to be around when we finally elect a woman president. That would be a great experience for me, to be up there cheering," she said. 

Dana Macario is a Seattle-area writer.

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Economics is becoming less of a man's world, and new research implies that as more women enter the profession that could lead to changes in economic policy.

"Without a doubt it will change policy," said Ann Mari May, an economics professor at University of Nebraska in Lincoln and one of the study's authors.

May and her co-authors surveyed hundreds of members of the American Economic Association for the study, which is due to be released in an upcoming issue of the journal Contemporary Economic Policy.

What they found was surprising: Despite similar training and background in economic principles, male and female economists tended to hold sharply different views about some of the biggest and most hotly debated economic issues.

For example, female economists were more likely to say employers should provide health insurance and that income distribution should be more equal. They also were more likely to disagree with the use of educational vouchers.

Women also were far more likely to conclude that job opportunities for men and women are not equal, and that specifically the economic profession favors men over women.

 “We were a little surprised to see that there were these striking differences,” May said.

The findings were especially interesting to May and her colleagues because they had taken great pains to ensure that they were surveying mainstream economists, whose views might be considered more closely aligned.

They also come as more women are pursuing the "dismal science" as a profession. Women earned 34.5 percent of new doctorates in economics in 2010, up from 27 percent in 2000, according to the researchers.

The research for the paper was conducted in late 2008 but took several years to compile and prepare for publication.

May thinks that as more women enter the field their voices will start to be heard when politicians and others craft economic policies. A more diverse group of expert opinions could lead to more rigorous debate and, perhaps, different ways of thinking about the nation’s major economic challenges.

If nothing else, she noted, the study should raise the awareness that all economists don’t think alike.

“It’s just sort of a snapshot that allows us to consider the diversity of the profession and how we sort of shortchange ourselves when we use phases like ‘all economists think this.’”  

Tip of the hat to USA Today, which earlier reported on this research.

 Though the media has focused on the plight of unemployed dads, it’s moms who are suffering the most in the current recession, a new study shows. 

The study, which looked at the outcomes for laid-off workers across the United States, found that married women with kids spent more time in-between jobs than married dads.

Making matters worse for the moms was the big pay cut they took once they finally found a job: On average moms lost $175 per week more than dads, according to the study, which was presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.

For the study, co-author Michelle Maroto, an assistant professor in the sociology department at the University of Alberta, scrutinized four sets of data from the Displaced Workers Supplement, a nationally representative survey conducted by the Census Bureau every other year.

The 2010 survey, for example, included nearly 4,400 displaced workers (people who had been laid off or lost a job because of a plant closing), who took an average of 17 weeks to find a new job.

When the researchers broke down the data according to marital and parental status, they found that moms experienced a significant “motherhood penalty” while fathers got a “daddy bonus.”

Maroto’s data doesn’t offer explanations as to why moms are taking such a big hit, but there have been hints from experimental studies.

Recent research has shown that employers will choose a dad over a mom because they fear that moms won’t be as available or committed to the job, Maroto says.

The assumption is that moms are more likely than dads to make the family their top priority. So, if a child gets sick, it will be the mom, and not the dad, who takes time off from work.

Intriguingly, employers are more likely to hire single women than a single man. Maroto wasn’t sure what to make of that. But, she points out, when single men and single women do find new jobs, they take an equal hit to their salaries – which ends up being a lot larger, by $123 per week, than that experienced by married men

For women who fear they might be in danger of suffering from the motherhood penalty when looking for a new job, Maroto has some advice: Don’t volunteer anything about your family in job applications and interviews. 

“What I’d say to mothers with children is that you don’t necessarily have to disclose your personal details when you’re applying for a job,” she says. “It’s definitely not something you want to indicate on our resume.” 

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Men expect to find work quicker if they lose their jobs, but feel less secure in their jobs than women.

Most everyone is worried about the job market in general, and with good reason. The unemployment rate has been higher than average for years, and improvements have been painfully slow.

But it turns out, the specifics of what they're worried about differ for men and women.

A new survey from Randstad finds that men are more likely than women to say the economy has had a negative effect on their career plans. Fifty-one percent of men feel that way, compared to 41 percent of women.

Men also are more likely to say they feel left behind in their careers, with 39 percent of men complaining that the economy had that effect compared to 31 percent of women. Men are also slightly more likely to be extremely worried about losing their jobs.

But the Randstad survey of about 3,000 full-time workers, which was conducted in February, finds that women are more jittery about what would happen if they actually did lose their jobs.

Women are slightly more likely than men to say they don’t think they could find a new job right away that they would want to accept.

In addition, women expect that it would take them longer to find a new job. The average amount of time women said they think it would take to find a new job is 5.4 months, compared to 4.7 months for men.

Kate Gallagher Robbins, senior policy analyst with the National Women's Law Center, said women may be more worried about finding a new job because they are seeing other women lose good-paying jobs in fields such as the public sector, and either strggling to find new work at all or taking a job that pays less.

"They’re really not hearing may good stories about women’s jobs right now," Robbins said.

On the other hand, men -- and particularly young men -- may feel particularly hard hit because the early part of the recession was so hard on them, she noted.

During the recession, men were losing jobs at such a fast pace that some dubbed it a “mancession.” But as the economy officially went into recovery, meaning it was slowly growing again, men started seeing job gains at a much faster clip than women. Only recently have things started to even out. 

The unemployment rate for men was 8.2 percent in April, down from a high of 11.2 percent in late 2009. For women, the unemployment rate was 8 percent in April, down from a high of 9 percent in late 2010.

It turns out there are other ways in which men and women react differently to work stress.

A separate study from the University of Calgary, which was also recently released, found that high levels of job strain increased the risk of depression in full-time male workers, but not of full-time female workers.

On the other hand, women who felt unappreciated in their jobs had a higher risk for depression, while the researchers didn’t see the same correlation for men.

The results were first reported by MyHealthNewsDaily.

Women are often told if they want power they have to speak up. So you’d think women leaders are chatting up a storm in boardrooms and in the halls of Congress.

Think again.

New research finds that even among women who hold powerful positions in government and business, they’re not making their voices heard as much as their powerful male counterparts, and for good reason.

“When women get power, talking a lot is seen negatively by other people,” said Victoria Brescoll, assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management. “They’re seen as domineering and controlling.”

Courtesy Yale University

Victoria Brescoll

Brescoll’s study of leaders and their vocalizing is titled “Who Takes the Floor and Why: Gender, Power, and Volubility in Organizations” and was published in the current issue of Administrative Science Quarterly.

In doing her research, Brescoll studied data from the U.S. Senate floor where the words spoken by all senators are recorded. She found that the most powerful male senators talked much more than powerful female senators.

In the study, she surmised that the difference could be a function of different genders having different ways of establishing rapport, “or because women are concerned about the potential backlash stemming from appearing to talk too much.”

The idea that women would be treated negatively if they did blab too much was supported by Brescoll’s additional research, where she had subjects rate hypothetical CEOs and politicians she created for research.

The women leaders who talked too much, according to the study, were rated as “significantly less competent and less suitable for leadership than a male CEO who was reported as speaking for the same amount.”

And both male and female participants in the study held this perception.

So should women leaders just shut up? No way, according to Brescoll.

“Women don’t do things because they anticipate a backlash, but that just reinforces stereotypes and becomes a collective action problem,” she stressed. If women don’t all join voices and start chattering away, she added, “then the stereotype will persist and we’ll continue to have this double standard at work.”

Time to start bending some ears, gals!

Pew Research Center

Perhaps it’s a good thing young women are getting college degrees at higher rates than men, because Americans seem to think women need that degree more.

A new survey from the Pew Research Center finds that 77 percent of Americans think women need a college education to get ahead in life, while only 68 percent think that’s true about men.

The data was part of a survey looking at how men and women perceive the value and benefits of college, and comes as the gap between young men and women completing a college degree continues to widen.

According to Pew, in 2010 36 percent of women ages 25 to 29 had completed a bachelor’s degree. That compares with 28 percent of men in that age group.

Pew Research Center

We know the weak economic recovery hasn’t been much of an upturn for anyone who wants a job. But after a recession that was so tough on men it was dubbed a "mancession," it is women who are having by far the hardest time in the recovery.

From June 2009 –- when the recession was officially declared over --  to May 2011, men gained about  768,000 jobs, while women lost 218,000 jobs, according to a report issued Wednesday by the Pew Research Center.

That’s a switch from the recession of December 2007 to June 2009, a period in which men lost more than 5 million jobs, while women lost just over 2 million jobs, according to calculations based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

The lopsided trend is something we first reported on in January.

Of course, no one is seeing a jobs bonanza, and the meager gains by men aren’t nearly enough to offset the millions of jobs that were lost. The official unemployment rate of 9.1 percent has fallen only slightly from its peak of 10.1 percent in late 2009. And whle men have done better than women in the recovery, their jobless rate is still higher than the rate for women.

Pew researchers say it’s not entirely clear why men are scoring more jobs than women in the recovery. Women have lost more jobs in certain sectors, such as government jobs. Men have gained more jobs than women in two key fields: professional and business services, and education and health services. 

Getty Images file

Most women probably assume that the decision whether or not to take your husband’s name is a personal one, but new research suggests it might also affect their chances of landing a job, as well as how much they are paid.

A woman who changes her name when she gets married is less likely to get hired and is assumed to make less money than a woman who keeps her name, according to the researchers at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

The Dutch researchers also found that married women who keep their maiden names were viewed as more competent and intelligent than those who take their husband’s name. On the other hand, women who changed their names were more likely to be viewed as caring, dependent, emotional and less ambitious.

For the 2010 study, called “What’s in a Name?”, the researchers asked 90 students to imagine that they have been invited to a party where they were either introduced to a married couple as Peter Bosboom and Helga Kuipers or Peter and Helga Kuipers.

The students were then asked to judge Helga on certain attributes. The Helga who had the same name as her husband was deemed more caring, dependent and emotional, while the Helga who had a different name was deemed more competent and intelligent.

In another part of the study, 50 students were asked to evaluate an applicant for a human resources position based on an e-mail that also included information about whether she had taken her partner’s name.

The applicant who had changed her name was deemed more dependent and less ambitious and less intelligent than the one who had kept her name. She also had a lower chance of being hired and received a lower estimated salary.

The findings are eye-opening, but it’s hard to know how extensive the real-world implications are. As SmartMoney noted in a piece on the research earlier this week, the researchers polled students rather than hiring managers. The researchers also note that prospective employers may not know a woman has changed her name.