It started when the baby rolled off and under the bed when she was in the shower getting ready to go to work. It got worse when the nanny couldn’t figure out how to e-mail her a photo of a nasty cut on her toddler son’s chin.
Then, when she was passed over for promotion for the second time because her boss didn’t think she could handle the job and her “family responsibilities,” Jennifer Folsom, an Alexandria consultant with an MBA from Georgetown, had had it. She quit, joining a small but persistent stream of educated, upper-income women who drop out of the workforce when they find they simply can’t have it all when it comes to work and family.
But Folsom didn’t opt out for long. She joined a fledgling recruiting and placement company and turned her prodigious energy toward helping mothers like her to “opt in” — to find fulfilling work in their own time and on their own terms.
With names like Momentum Resources, 10 Til 2, On-Ramps and Flexforce Professionals, these firms are at the forefront of a growing movement to remake the American workplace not just for mothers but for everyone.
Ellen Grealish of Reston, who started Flexforce Professionals with two other working mothers after opting out of the workforce for eight years, said she has seen traditional workplaces embrace flexibility once they’ve seen how these working mothers use it so productively.
That was certainly the case for Mark Madigan, who owns IT Cadre, a software engineering firm in Ashburn. He calls the job candidates Grealish sends him his “smart moms.” And they now make up 10 percent of his workforce.
Flexibility can come with trade-offs: contract jobs with no benefits and no long-term job security, fewer opportunities for advancement or reduced hours with reduced pay.
But those in the opt-in movement say many mothers are willing to give up income if that means taking control of their schedules, and, perhaps most important, doing meaningful, challenging work in their chosen professions rather than what they see as the less interesting work of the often-stigmatized “mommy track.”
“I know mothers at law firms who felt they were relegated to doing less interesting and less time-sensitive work because of the choices they’d made,” said Lilly Garcia, a lawyer and a mother who just joined a new D.C. law practice, Clearspire, that embraces flexibility. “But here, flexibility means more interesting assignments, more challenge.”
Read More at The Washington Post.