Working Mother's Top 10

In Alphabetical Order, here are the top ten companies(although, not all home based) for mother's to work for:

Abbott Laboratories, IL (1st time on Top 10; 2 years on list)

American Express, NY (1st time on Top 10; 13 years on list)

Bank of America, NC (9th time on Top 10; 14 years on list)

Booz Allen Hamilton, VA (1st time on Top 10; 4 years on list)

Bristol-Myers Squibb, NY (2nd time on Top 10; 5 years on list)

Colgate-Palmolive, NY (1st time on Top 10; 3 years on list)

Computer Associates, NY (1st time on Top 10; 3 years on list)

Fannie Mae, DC (4th time on Top 10; 9 years on list)

General Mills, MN (1st time on Top 10; 7 years on list)

IBM, NY (15th time on Top 10; 17 years on list)

State locations are for corporate headquarters. Luckily, some branches and offices are right here in Indiana!

U.S. Polls say Women Want to be at Home

A few statistics that support women wanting to stay home:
A CBS News polled in April 2006 that 68% of women see a conflict between working and raising a family.
A study in 1997 by the Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology found, “Stress appears to be strongly related to being employed outside the home and is more strongly felt by women working more hours, especially those working full-time.”
Eight out of ten women would rather stay at home with their children according to an article by Charlotte Gill published in The Daily Mail 2006. The research also found that 78% were likely to give up work to be with their children if money were not an issue.
The 2001 U.S. Current Population Survey found that twice as many women opted for fewer office hours than men.
Article Link

Yale and Harvard Women to Stay Home

Ivy League students, including 138 freshman and senior females at Yale, were recently surveyed about their plans for the future.
The interviews found that 85 of the students, or roughly 60 percent, said that when they had children, they planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely. About half of those women said they planned to work part time, and about half wanted to stop work for at least a few years.

The women said that pursuing a rigorous college education was worth the time and money because it would help position them to work in meaningful part-time jobs when their children are young or to attain good jobs when their children leave home.

It is a complicated issue and one that most schools have not addressed. The women they are counting on to lead society are likely to marry men who will make enough money to give them a real choice about whether to be full-time mothers, unlike those women who must work out of economic necessity.

It is less than clear what universities should, or could, do about it. For one, a person's expectations at age 18 are less than perfect predictors of their life choices 10 years later. And in any case, admissions officers are not likely to ask applicants whether they plan to become stay-at-home moms.

According to a 2000 survey of Yale alumni from the classes of 1979, 1984, 1989 and 1994, conducted by the Yale Office of Institutional Research, more men from each of those classes than women said that work was their primary activity - a gap that was small among alumni in their 20's but widened as women moved into their prime child-rearing years. Among the alumni surveyed who had reached their 40's, only 56 percent of the women still worked, compared with 90 percent of the men.

A 2005 study of comparable Yale alumni classes found that the pattern had not changed. Among the alumni who had reached their early 40's, just over half said work was their primary activity, compared with 90 percent of the men. Among the women who had reached their late 40's, some said they had returned to work, but the percentage of women working was still far behind the percentage of men.
A 2001 survey of Harvard Business School graduates found that 31 percent of the women from the classes of 1981, 1985 and 1991 who answered the survey worked only part time or on contract, and another 31 percent did not work at all, levels strikingly similar to the percentages of the Yale students interviewed who predicted they would stay at home.

NY Times Article Link

Photos from Harvard.edu & Yale.edu

Changing Demographics

The most significant change to United States labor force was in the last half of the 20th century when a large amount of women entered the market. In 1950, 29.6% of the workforce was made up of women.

By 1999, it was 46.6%. The workforce today is almost at a gender balance.

However, women now outnumber men on college campuses. Women are filling more technical, professional, medical, and managerial jobs. Perhaps with more men being stay at home fathers, women may tip the balance scales and drastically upset the labor pool.

Stay at Home Mom's Wages

Salary.com recently surveyed mothers to determine what they wage would be if they were in fact paid. Based on its survey of more than 40,000 mothers, Salary.com determined that the time mothers spend performing 10 typical job functions would be equal to an annual salary of $138,095 for a stay-at-home mother. And those statistics are only for 10 job fuctions. Think about the hundreds of different tasks that are completed arould the house everyday.

Also, noteworthy is the 'salary' that working mothers would receive outside of their normal paychecks. Working Mom's 'at-home' salary is $85,939 in 2007.

Equal Rights

Women have been struggling since the 1920s to have the same rights that men have. Although winning many battles, the right to short haircuts, to wear pants, to drive, it wasn't until the middle of the century when the really important rights were given to women. Women have been holding conventions(Seneca Falls), rallying, protesting, and petitioning for liberties that we take for granted today. And it wasn't that long ago that the American Constitution was amended to give women(and other minority groups) the right to vote.
* * *
Gone is the 1950s lifestyle where husband works Monday through Friday and returns home at dinner time to find wife waiting with hot, homemade meatloaf. Gone also is the lifestyle of the wife at home, cleaning, cooking, marketing, gardening, sewing, mending, laundering, meanwhile teaching, nuturing and raising several children.
Since women were so eager to work, that is in fields besides nursing, teaching, and typing, the entire economic balance has shifted. The workforce greatly grew when women came aboard to compete with men. Men can't often afford to be the single supporter of the family. Upon comparing the 2000s women with the 1950s women, sometimes its difficult to find any similarities.

I will explore the economic impact of working women in a later blog.

Selling From Home

These are some companies in the selling industry, besides Ebay, where you can work from home.


Ameriplan
At Home America
Arbonne
Avon
BreatheClean
Discovery Toys
Fifth Avenue Collection
Girls Night In
Home and Garden Party
Kaire World
Jewels by ParkLane
Lady Emily Natural Cosmetics
Lemongrass Spa
Lia Sophia
Mary Kay Cosmetics
Million Wishes
Moms 4 Net Profit
Noah's Ark Workshop
Passion Parties
ScentSations
Signature HomeStyles
Southern Living at Home
Suzanne (Zanco)
Swiss Colony Occasions
Swissjust
The Traveling Vineyard

My sister

My sister is very high up at Vera Bradley. She is the CMO and also wears many other hats for the company. She recently had a baby, by recently I mean 3 months ago. She was sure she would be ready and eager to return to work, but now she realizes how important it is for her to be home with her son. To ease her tranisition back to the corporate lifestyle, Vera Bradley is allowing her to work from home. She is communicating via phone, email and and webcam. She only needs to be in her office for direct meetings and trainings. Vera Bradley started as a small family company but now is going global.

Luckily, they remain family-oriented and can be personal enough to help career women care for their families.

Why Career Women are Staying at Home

Why are degreed women more than ever pursuing their rights to be full time mothers?

In my opinion, employers are making it easier to work fr0m home. It is estimated that more than 11% of people work directly from home.

Also, career women are also realizing the benefit of staying home with small children and providing constant care, versus full time day care. A recent article on today.msn explains why it is so important to spend the early years with your child. After all, this time you can never retrieve once it is gone.



http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/18616558/