Creative executive Jenna Anderson and her daughter Luana, in the kitchen of their Toronto home.Alex Franklin
Jenna Anderson has days that start around 6:15 a.m. and can end at midnight. An executive at a creative agency and the mother of a three-year-old, Ms. Anderson is up early to get the household on track and often works for a few hours following her daughter’s bedtime. It’s a gruelling pace, but after a career of hustling and hard work, she doesn’t want to lose ground.
“I’ve definitely daydreamed about getting an easier job,” says Ms. Anderson, 40. But she feels it would be hard to regain a position like her current one if she took a lower-profile job until her daughter is older. “There would be questions around why [I] decided to take a step back. The man doesn’t take an easier job so they can be there for their family.”
As her family’s so-called breadwinner – she makes double the salary of her husband, who also works full-time – her income is also part of the equation. Without it, they might not own their home in Toronto.
“I really do love my job. There’s a lot of personal fulfilment and rewards,” she says. “But there are so many things that have to be sacrificed,” such as time with friends or alone time with her husband.
Hit with the motherhood penalty
Ms. Anderson is part of an increasing number of breadwinner women in Canada, according to a recent report by the Vanier Institute of the Family. It found that women making more than 50 per cent of total income in “different-gender couple census families” went from 25.9 per cent in 2000 to 32.8 per cent in 2022.
However, being a breadwinner and a mother is much less common, at 10.7 per cent, increasing marginally from 7.8 per cent in 2000. Experts say that’s because mothers still face stigma in the workplace, driving the phenomenon known as the motherhood penalty, in which mothers often take a pay cut while fathers see a pay bump.
Mothers also continue to be responsible for a majority of a family’s housework and child-care duties, whether or not they have high-earning jobs or multiple jobs, making it hard for many to continue in their careers at the same pace after having children.
“Men today are doing more child care than their own father did on average; the trick is that mothers are also spending more time with their kids than they were in the past,” says Dr. Joanna Pepin, an associate professor in sociology at University of Toronto who has studied breadwinner mothers. “It’s gone up for both, so it’s not really closing the parenting gap.”
Dr. Pepin’s research – which includes the recently published paper “Why Are So Many U.S. Mothers Becoming Their Family’s Primary Economic Support?” – found that 70 per cent of mothers will be the family’s primary earner at some point in their child’s first 18 years.
That finding underlines the “urgency” for employers and society to better support mothers in the workplace, she says, especially considering still-prevalent beliefs that mothers are “ideal” parents and fathers are “ideal” workers.
“There’s a lot of bias, and belief that mothers are less responsible and less devoted to their jobs than fathers are. That can hurt women in their careers,” Dr. Pepin says, noting women with children are still less likely to be promoted than their colleagues. “This is partly because they may have temporarily exited the labour force to care for children, losing out not only on the money when out of the labour force, but the experience that might get you the next promotion.”
The workplace as a ‘greedy institution’
Yue Qian, associate professor of sociology at University of British Columbia, says research has shown hiring managers are more likely to select a candidate that does not have a resume gap related to child care, even between two resumés that are otherwise similar.
She notes that workplace cultures of long hours and devotion to the company have their origins in the post-Second World War era, when the income from one family member was enough to support a household and that worker was typically a man. Cost of living has since risen, requiring both parents to work in most cases, but workplace expectations haven’t changed enough to leave room for the flexibility parents require, she says.
“Research has shown the workplace as a greedy institution,” Dr. Qian says. “Oftentimes, good jobs require working long hours and they assume the ideal workers are workers without family responsibilities.”
Dr. Qian adds that many female breadwinners are low-income women, women with two jobs, single parents and racialized women.
Kadie Philp, commissioner and chief administrative officer of Ontario’s Pay Equity Office, says there are ways workplaces can help reduce the gender pay gap and motherhood penalty, such as continuing to pay into a woman’s pension during maternity leave. She says companies should encourage men to take parental leave so that it becomes less gendered and stigmatized.
As things are now, making up for a child-related career interruption is often left to women to figure out, Ms. Philp says.
“Women have to think seriously about, if there’s going to be a career interruption, how do I make it up later?” she says. “How do I work with my management team to make sure I’m not overlooked for a promotion?
“It’s unfortunate that it’s on the woman to do that.”
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