July 27, 2007
Define "full time"

There was this article in the Chron business section earlier this week about how more women with children are saying they want to work part-time these days. I don't know a whole lot about that, but it seems to me we could short-circuit a lot of the discussion that's sure to follow this if we take note of one fairly significant fact that went otherwise unremarked upon:


For Erica Rubach, a 32-year-old mother of two, the findings weren't a surprise. A year ago she felt she couldn't keep her head above water, though to others her life might have seemed ideal: two young kids and a job she loved as director of marketing and business development at a television station.

"But I knew there just wasn't room for both in my life," she says. "It was killing me."

So she left her job, with its 60-70 hour weeks, and with fellow mother Joani Reisen founded MomSpace, a networking site devoted to matching mothers with services in their communities. The two now work on their own schedules.


Well, there's your problem right there! Sixty to seventy hours a week isn't a fulltime job, it's a fulltime job plus a parttime job. You cannot work 60-70 hours a week and be a primary caretaker for a child, at least not without being under enormous pressure, the kind of pressure that makes most people break. I couldn't have done that - I'd never see my kids if I worked those kinds of hours. Maybe if her job had entailed only 40 hours a week of work - which, let's be honest, is all they were paying her for; people with titles like "director of marketing" don't get overtime - she could have handled this.

The irony is that she's probably working about 40 hours a week at MomSpace now. And that probably feels like a part time job to her. I'd say that's a pretty significant part of the problem here, wouldn't you?

Posted by Charles Kuffner on July 27, 2007 to Society and cultcha
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