For members of my parents’ generation, taking a white-collar job meant being away from home. My mom had to quit work or put me in daycare; my dad spent many late evenings in the city, only to arrive home long past dinner.
My husband, on the other hand, enjoys a different setup. He takes our son on a walk before work because he works remotely and doesn’t need to beat the morning traffic. He can wash dishes at lunch and cuddle our son for a moment as I escape to the bathroom. During his five months of paid paternity leave, he learned the ins and outs of naptimes and feeding schedules. As long as my husband can lean on me as primary caretaker, he doesn’t have to choose between family and work.
But I, a recent law school graduate, must still choose. If I am to persist as the primary caretaker through a decade or so of breastfeeding and raising multiple children to school age, I will be unable to take a traditional, full-time, white-collar job. Those jobs are set up for single people, parents who outsource the primary care of their children, or the parent whose spouse stays home. Amelia Buzzard illustrated the dilemma with a vivid metaphor: professional lives are like early-edition denim jeans, made only for able-bodied men. What would it be like to make “Levi’s” for women? Is it possible to honor our reproductive clocks and caregiving desires and also enable a fruitful professional life too?
Today, flexible work is a theoretical possibility for knowledge workers, yet white-collar institutions still prefer 9-to-5 workers. The lack of alternatives to this model is a lose-lose situation for mothers and society alike. We can gainfully employ moms who are primary caretakers if we embrace the reality that they are a different kind of worker. It is time for the mothers of my generation to rally together and carve a space for ourselves.
A Lack of Pathways
Law school was a good time to have a child. The baby came in the spring of my second year, and I took advantage of my pass-fail options while front-loading my semester. I worked for myself, on my own time, on my own terms.
Yet I also enjoyed institutional support. The school provided access to research tools and health insurance, and in the clinic where I performed client work for class credit, I enjoyed a workspace where every day was bring-your-child-to-work day, with printers and office supplies and administrative staff that sorted my mail. My clinical professors sat on the floor and played bobble-heads with my son as I talked through the legal argument for our next filing.
I wasn’t paid a salary for my work, but in that season, I learned to become a lawyer. In return, the school received more than tuition. Because I’d been permitted to master an area of immigration and employment law on my own time, on my own terms, I managed 45 clients and contributed to workplace law scholarship at the national level, all in my school’s name. When a self-starting mom is supported, and does well, she is not the only one who benefits.
Unfortunately, none of my post-graduation paths offered the mother-friendly flexibility I’d enjoyed in school. I received and turned down soft offers for a prestigious federal clerkship and from several prominent employment law firms and applied to no public interest fellowships. All of them were full-time positions. I had planned to enroll in the public service loan forgiveness program offered by the government, but it required that I work at least 30 hours a week at a qualifying organization.
I was hesitant even to ask for remote part-time work. “Dear supervisor,” I imagined myself asking, “would you be able to keep our meetings to before 8am or after 8pm, or possibly during the actual work day depending on whether my one-year-old has gone down for a nap, which could start anywhere from 1pm to 2pm and end in as little as 45 minutes? Would you mind if I had to leave the call early to rock him back to sleep and possibly be unable to return? Would it be okay if I didn’t report for three weeks because we had back-to-back teething, sleep regression, and illness?” I could never ask such a thing. The whole notion flew in the face of the professional norms that characterize the white-collar workplace.
Are these norms based on immutable realities? Or could they be changed? It is true that certain kinds of high-pressure, tight-timeline work are simply not feasible at this stage of life with the caregiving choices I’ve made. Yet my ability to support my indigent clients has never suffered because I am a mom. In fact, after I became a mother, our rhythms fell in closer step. My clients prefer to call in the evening because they work during the day, just like me. What generated the first inkling of trust with immigrants at my church was not my credentials from a fancy law school but because my son made eyes at them across the pews. A friend I was helping to find pro bono representation settled into the worn chair at my kitchen table as my son played around her feet, visibly relaxed in the midst of such commonplace humanity.
Companies seemed amenable to flexible work for a few years after the pandemic but have reversed course in the last few years. They continue to increase the number of in-office days per week and roll back remote work arrangements. Many have even implemented monitoring tools to ensure that people are glued to their screens if they do happen to be working at home. This reversion is hardly surprising. The white-collar workplace resumed demanding what elite echelons have always required: being unencumbered, so that one may deliver for the bottom line.
Shunned by institutions, mothers are reduced to gig workers in a double sense. Their caregiving labor entails no financial compensation, no access to retirement benefits, no health insurance. The odd jobs they take on freelance sites like Fiverr may be financially compensated, but they come with no health insurance, no retirement contributions, and no institutional support. The more flexible jobs are, the less likely it is that they offer a wage high enough to make it worth squeezing in an hour of work after a full day of childcare.
Why the Exclusion of Mothers is a Problem
The exclusion of mothers from white-collar workplaces where they would have enjoyed institutional support and an economic safety net hurts mothers and society alike. This lose-lose-situation applies not only to public interest law, but to other professions requiring graduate degrees.
When I entered law school, I believed that I could pay off my debt in a timely manner. It wasn’t a problem that I wished to work in public interest, where my clients could not pay for my services. A full-time public interest lawyer still earns a salary. What’s more, he or she is eligible for loan assistance and forgiveness programs, the result of an axiomatic understanding that we should redistribute some of the wealth generated by what can be a lucrative profession to those who can’t afford legal representation, so that everyone can access the legal system and their lawyers can be paid for their labor. The problem was that I was raising my one-year-old and not able to access this income stream at all.
In addition to repaying debt, lawyers must at minimum upkeep their bar memberships. Bar associations may require the completion of in-person learning credits, which places an inordinate burden on full-time caregivers, and admission to another state’s bar may require evidence of an active legal practice or a passing score on the bar exam. A passing score on the bar exam only lasts five years; if the score is not used for admission to a state bar within that time, the examinee cannot use it at all. Less pressing but important are needs like staying apprised of major changes in the field and constructing the narrative of one’s professional life in resumes and online.
Other professionals like doctors, social workers, and counselors face similar concerns. These professions require graduate degrees that often lead to debt and have licensure requirements that are simpler to maintain than to reacquire after a lapse. In all fields, it is helpful for workforce reentry to stay connected with one’s professional network and have some resume fodder. Moms excluded from the workplace by overlong hours and inflexible schedules may be unable to clear these hurdles. If her husband cannot afford to pay off her loans, the interest on her debt balloons. Unable to fulfill licensure requirements, she risks having to retake licensure exams; she may never seek licensing again. She loses touch with the professional field, making it feel difficult or even impossible to reenter it, even when her children are grown.
Meanwhile, society loses that worker, not just for the time she is rearing her young children but maybe for good. From an economic standpoint, this is a great waste. From a public interest standpoint—where the need for lawyers is dire and consequential—it is a tragedy. This is especially true in immigration law. Noncitizens, many of them children, waste away in prisons and jails on American soil without edible food or space to lie down to sleep, their wrists bound with twist ties and slashed carelessly by guards that treat them like cattle. The legal system is the only way to remedy this injustice.
When we fail to invite lawyer moms into the workplace—not because we have qualms about the effectiveness of their work, but because they don’t fit the mold that employers want—they are not the only ones who suffer.
Supporting Caregiving Mothers in White-Collar Jobs
For mothers, acceptance into the white-collar workforce might look like embracing that she works different hours from week to week; encouraging acceptance of work product that doesn’t require tons of time in front of the computer; paying a salary rather than hourly to acknowledge that her labor isn’t easily tracked by the hour; and facilitating professional support from other moms like herself.
We should treat workers as humans and not as fungible resources. We need only think a little more broadly from “compensating” a worker to providing for her as a person and as a mother. We already know mothers perform invaluable caregiving work for no pay. If mothers are, at the same time, performing jobs for which we typically send home hundreds of dollars per hour, don’t moms have one of the most compelling cases for being compensated for value? Why not convert some of that value into something other than cash? Flexibility and institutional support are as much a way of providing for mothers as paying them an hourly sum.
I believe that we can design employment that does not require cookie-cutter workers. For public interest lawyers, one potential setup would be a fellowship, renewable year-to-year with a grace period for births, that allows a mother to work on a public interest project for a modest part-time salary. If, say, a mother would like to earn at least the amount of her required loan repayment on the standard 10-year repayment plan, such an amount is neither excessive nor unreasonable. If a median loan of $160,000 requires a yearly repayment sum of $22,000, and a mother works six hours a week, then she makes $70 an hour, which is at least four times lower than what private lawyers make per hour and about what full-time public interest lawyers make per hour (if you include their nominal salary, health insurance, retirement matching, and loan repayment assistance).
As for other forums of institutional support, the fellowship would provide access to research tools and secure storage like Westlaw, PACER, and Dropbox, as well as mom-tailored tools like PDFToAudio, which would enable them to pop in their earbuds while watching their children, or Adobe Reader, which would allow them to read on their phones while immobilized under a napping child. For those who want to work directly with clients, the fellowship would provide email templates for reaching out to local legal aid organizations, outlining what the local legal aid organization might do (refer clients) and what the fellowship would do (act as employer). If a mom does accrue enough hours to qualify for her school’s part-time loan forgiveness program, the fellowship would supply the paperwork to show she has fulfilled her hours. The fellowship might also hold regular “office hour” calls where moms can troubleshoot each other’s problems and provide feedback to the fellowship administrators about what is working and what could be improved.
Most importantly, this fellowship would be founded on trust and compassion, even as it lays out clear professional expectations. The concept is simple, and the financial footprint would not be large. I assume that the bureaucracy required to receive donor money and the administrative work of running a nonprofit are the reasons most moms don’t readily create this option for themselves.
When I became a mother, I found myself leaning heavily on others–my husband, my mother, a friend–to perform tasks I was accustomed to doing on my own: feeding myself, hobbling into the car, getting a glass of water. It only struck me later that it was right of me to depend on others, for a helpless human depends on me. We moms know that the most important endeavors require a village. That’s why I am calling on other moms, entrepreneurs, and philanthropists to work together to design a solution. As we engage in this grand experiment, we might just be able to build something better—together.
