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Mothers are paying the price of parenthood

It’s become a Mother’s Day tradition on a par with candy, flowers and guilt. While advertisers wax poetically about the priceless work of motherhood, economists tally up the paycheck for the services she performs.

This year, salary.com estimates the value of a full-time mom at $138,095, up 3 percent from last year. The monetary value of a second-shift mom is $85,939, on top of her day job.

I think most mother’s know they’ll never get that kind of monetary reward for childcare and most probably wouldn’t want to reduce motherhood to dollars and cents. Though the least they could expect is a little respect and it looks like some employers aren’t giving it,

Correll performed an experiment to see if there was a motherhood penalty in the job market. She and her colleagues at Cornell University created an ideal job applicant with a successful track record, an uninterrupted work history, a boffo resume, the whole deal.

Then they tucked a little telltale factoid into some of the resumes with a tip-off about mom-ness. It described her as an officer in a parent-teacher association. And — zap — she was mommified.

Moms were seen as less competent and committed. Moms were half as likely to be hired as childless women or men with or without kids. Moms were offered $11,000 less in starting pay than non-moms. And, just for good measure, they were also judged more harshly for tardiness.

One could say that once women make the choice to be mothers they should just stay at home anyway.  If you run a business - you know one of those deals where you sell goods or services you might want to start thinking in a way that is a little less rigid since if every mom in America decided to stay home and not work they’d take a big chunk of the economy home with them, Working Moms by the Numbers

* 26 million - The number of jobs that would become vacant overnight if all moms stopped working tomorrow.

* $476 billion - The amount of money working mothers contribute, as a whole, to U.S. household incomes, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

* $135 billion - What mothers spent on clothing, vacations and new cars in 2004, according to research cited by Carol Evans.

 Dreamland a photo gallery and interview with photographer Marshall Sokoloff

What becomes of resorts planned with big dreams—yachts, country clubs, roads paved and phone poles wired—that never materialize? Forty minutes from Palm Springs, photographer Marshall Sokoloff spent two years roaming the deserted zones of Salton City, tracking the desolation.