What your boss needs to know about loud parenting

As any parent who was required to work remotely without childcare during the pandemic can attest, keeping your kids in the background (or even out of earshot) was pretty much impossible.

For decades, working parents — mothers in particular — have hidden their parenting responsibilities, and afternoon ballet recitals and midweek soccer games were masked as miscellaneous appointments to make it seem like parenting wasn’t taking precedence over professional demands and responsibilities.

And you can understand why: according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), married mothers with at least one child under the age of 18 earn 76 cents on a married father’s dollar, while single mothers earn 83.1 cents to a single custodial father’s dollar.

This is compared to childless women (including married and unmarried) earning 93 cents on a childless man’s dollar, while research conducted by Third Way, a national think tank, shows that women’s earnings drop by 4% when they start having children, while first-time fathers see their income increase by 6%.

However, working parents are now leaning into the concept of loud parenting, which is all about not hiding the fact that you’re a parent, and looking for employers which not only accept the demands of parenting, but support them in a highly visible and tangible way.

In fact, research by childcare provider Bright Horizons found that a job that helps meet family and child care responsibilities is almost as important as getting a significant pay increase (35% and 36% respectively). The report also highlighted that Gen Z and millennial parents are more likely than Gen X and boomers to leave their jobs for better benefits (29% versus 25%) and jobs that fit better with their family responsibilities (18% versus 13%).

While The Great Resignation may be starting to slow slightly, job openings are still plentiful. Statista reports that at the end of August 2022 there were approximately 10.63 million job openings in the U.S. and employers are under increasing pressure to retain staff with benefits and values that go further than they used to.

So if you feel like your voice isn’t being heard, now is the perfect time to visit the VentureBeat Job Board or check out the three open roles below, all in companies that have already bolstered their commitment to working parents.

Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services, Boston