When Kayla Stotts and her ex separated last year, the mother of three boys overhauled her life, seemingly overnight.
“I became a single mom in the same month I got a job and an apartment,” Stotts said.
She’d put a degree and career on hold to raise her kids. When they separated, the Camas mom dove into the workforce and is now employed full time as a certified nursing assistant and intake coordinator at Touchmark Home Health. Her sons are 2, 4 and 7 years old.
For single parents, serving as both the sole caregiver and primary breadwinner is a superhuman effort no matter the gender of the parent. But the latest American Community Survey data from the U.S. Census Bureau indicates that unmarried moms, in particular, face a huge hurdle.
The median annual wage for a household led by a single mom in Clark County is $28,634. For a household led by a single dad, it’s nearly double, at $53,271.
So what’s happening?
Timing is everything, according to Amy Wharton, a professor of sociology at Washington State University Vancouver studying gender and work.
“There are a couple things that could explain that difference. Single dads are more likely to become single dads through divorce, whereas single moms have never married. (And these moms are likely not getting anything from the father),” Wharton wrote in an email to The Columbian.
A divorced, single father’s work is often disrupted at a point when they have more groundwork laid into their career and more flexibility in their hours. As more experienced employees, they’re better situated to bargain with their bosses about wages and work schedules and are harder to replace.
On the other hand, single mothers are more likely than fathers to become a sole caregiver younger, through an unplanned pregnancy. The time that would be spent launching an education or career instead is spent raising children.
Divorced moms often face a similar barrier. Regional labor economist Scott Bailey said that for many mothers, relationships ending in divorce put them at a disadvantage, because mothers are still more likely than fathers to have to reduce hours or drop out of the workforce.
“A lot of times, women with young kids are working part time,” Bailey said. “And then, even if their relationship comes to an end when the kids are older, they don’t have the same work history as the dad.”
That’s what happened in Stotts’ case. “He went to college, he got the better job and he was the breadwinner for the house. When I left that situation, I didn’t have much of a work history or anything to put under my belt,” Stotts said.
Heidi Kennedy, a Vancouver mom of two teenage boys, came up against a similar hurdle. She and her husband separated five years ago and shared custody of their children. He’d been the breadwinner, and she was the primary caregiver, setting her own hours as a hairstylist while working online toward a nursing degree.
When they divorced, she dropped out of the nursing program and took up a second job selling skin care products.
“I sort of felt defeated and discouraged,” Kennedy said. “My kids were getting older, and I didn’t want to start over as a nurse.”
The skin care gig took off, Kennedy said, and combined with the success of her hairstyling business she’s in a much better financial situation now. But it was a hard time.
“For a couple years, I struggled,” she said.
These circumstances among single parents play out across the country, though not quite as dramatically — nationwide, single dads make $41,054 annually compared with single moms’ $26,141. That’s a lower salary for both genders, but it’s also a narrower gap. The median salary of a single American mother is 64 percent of the median salary of a single American father, compared with 53 percent in Clark County.
Why is the local divide so wide?
Frankly, Bailey said, we don’t know. There’s no easy explanation, especially in a high-income region such as Southwest Washington.
A common explanation is that single dads have a leg up because they’re less likely than single moms to live alone. According to the American Community Survey data, 53 percent of single American fathers live with an unmarried partner, compared with just 20 percent of single mothers.
The effect of a partner is dramatic. With someone to share household tasks, single parents can put in more hours at work.
While that same dynamic exists in Clark County, it’s actually less dramatic, and it certainly doesn’t explain the massive local salary gap between single moms and single dads. According to the local survey, 47.8 percent of single dads live with a partner, and 28 percent of single mothers do — still a big disparity, but a smaller one than the national average.
“About Clark County — I’m not really sure what’s going on,” Wharton wrote in her email. “To really explain this you would have to drill down and look at the characteristics of single moms and single dads.”
Drilling down
The local American Community Survey data offers one possible factor to explain the income gap between single moms and single dads: the ages of their children. School-age kids are less time-consuming than younger kids and thus less restrictive to a parent’s income.
In Clark County, kids living with single fathers are disproportionately older than kids living with single fathers across the country. This is true of both single moms and dads in Clark County, but the contrast is more pronounced among the dads.
According to the survey, 41.3 percent of single, father-led households in the United States include kids younger than 6 years old. In Clark County, that figure is just 29.5 percent.
Commuting might also offer some answers.
Nationwide, practically everyone works within their state of residence -- 95.6 percent of men and 97 percent of women.
In Clark County, though, there’s a gender gap in who travels out of state to their jobs (presumably to Portland). Of local men, 36 percent pursue career opportunities across the river, compared with just 23.6 percent of local women.
Commuting times by gender reflect this, too. On average, Clark County men travel 28.4 minutes to work, while women travel 24 minutes. This gap is also wider than the national figures.
Consider the implication of commuting when juggling responsibilities at home. If employees are also single parents, they bear the brunt of getting home by a hard deadline every single day -- to pick up a child from an after-school program or to get dinner on the table.
Working in Portland is just one more barrier to getting that done. Traffic doesn’t care about your kid’s karate class, and in a community that skirts the borders of a major metropolitan area, flexible schedules and the freedom to commute could make a major difference in job opportunities and earnings.
Take Stotts’ schedule. On days she has the kids she’s a parent, employee and homemaker virtually nonstop from 6 a.m. to around 10 p.m. Her life would border on impossible if she didn’t enjoy a geographic advantage -- she lives barely 15 minutes from work, and the day care facility for her two youngest sons is across the street from the office.
The proximity is a godsend, she said. Even an extra 20 minutes tacked onto her commute would result in chaos. With three young boys, she said, “that 20 minutes is the difference between a meltdown or a book before bed.”
There’s discrimination
It’s also worth noting that on top of all these tangible factors, a growing body of research supports the existence of a less-quantifiable “motherhood penalty” in the workplace.
A Harvard study found that mothers and pregnant women are perceived as less competent and committed to their jobs compared with childless women. Mothers were also considered less committed and competent than men, both fathers and non-fathers.
For fathers, the reverse was true. Men with kids were seen as more committed to their jobs than men with no children, translating to more promotion opportunities. Fathers were also more likely to enjoy a higher starting salary, the study found.
In 2014, a study from University of Massachusetts Amherst expanded on this dynamic of a “motherhood penalty” and “fatherhood bonus.”
A New York Times article reporting on the study explained: “These differences persist even after controlling for factors like the hours people work, the types of jobs they choose and the salaries of their spouses. So the disparity is not because mothers actually become less productive employees and fathers work harder when they become parents -- but because employers expect them to.”
The family factor
While the American Community Survey data provides a valuable snapshot, it can’t tell the whole story. Statistics aren’t people. Every family is different.
It also can’t account for the most valuable resource among many parents: time with their kids. When Kennedy decided to shelve studying for her nursing degree, for instance, it was with a clear-eyed look at the pros and cons.
“Yes, the benefits are great,” she said. “But that wasn’t worth it to me to give up that time with them.”
Stotts makes it work with a full-time job and three youngsters -- she was recently promoted at work -- but her days are a constant battle against time. She said she fights to find those quiet moments, those pockets in the schedule where she can just enjoy her kids and their company. Guilt, Stotts said, is a daily companion.
“Am I not giving my kids enough attention? That’s a struggle I think any single parent has, is pulling themselves every which way,” she said.
What is the American Community Survey?
The U.S. Census Bureau is best known for its massive questionnaire of the country’s residents every 10 years.
But the bureau is always gathering information about our nation and its people with the American Community Survey, which releases annual updates about jobs, housing, income, education, families and more.
The American Community Survey releases three levels of data: one-year estimates, three-year estimates and five-year estimates. Of those, five-year estimates have the lowest margins of error because the data involves a larger sample size collected over a longer period of time. This article uses countywide and nationwide data from the 2013-2017 American Community Survey five-year estimates, which were released Dec. 6.
