How Much Would Being a Stay-at-Home Mom Pay in Salary? — Dollars and Sense
While one might think that women in the workforce command more respect and big salaries, it turns out, stay-at-home moms are worth quite a bit themselves when you factor the tangibles and intangibles.
But exactly how much is being a mom worth?
TIME reports that data compiled by Salary.com indicates a mother’s work isn’t priceless, as nice as that sentiment may be. Statistics show that stay-at-home mothers work 94.7 hours a week, much more than the standard, 9-5 workday. Combining her duties, which range from laundry to cook to psychologist, mom could command $17.80 per hour on the open market, which totals — drumroll, please — $112,962 per year.
That’s compared to the median of working mothers, whose “mom salary” would average $66,979 per year at 57.9 hours for duties around the house beyond her paying job.
CBS MoneyWatch’s Suzanne Lucas took issue with Salary.com’s monetizing of mom chores. She pointed out that everyone, regardless of whether they have kids or not, cooks and cleans, and those duties shouldn’t be quantified on the same scale as professional responsibilities. You can’t assign a dollar value to certain things.
We still love mom and all she does, though.
[TIME]