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In certain corners of corporate America, a generous parental leave policy has become a crucial tool for recruiting and retention. Many of the biggest tech employers have been leaders on this front, offering 16 to 20 weeks of leave, or even close to six months at companies like Google. But even as companies have expanded their parental leave benefits, few of them have sought to address the unique challenges many parentsand especially mothersface when they actually return to work. A handful of companies, among them Apple and Amazon, offer a grace period that enables employees to ease back into work part-time or work flexible hours for a few weeks. Despite all these advances, clinical psychologist and author Angele Close argues that many leaders still dont fully comprehend how pregnancy and motherhood fundamentally changes peoplea phenomenon that is now better understood. Over the last decade, researchers have studied how going through pregnancy and motherhood alters cognition and changes the brain in a manner that lasts at least two years. Theres a term for this experience: matrescence, which Close defines as a profound identity transformation that women go through becoming mothers, [which] affects all areas of their lifephysiologically, neurologically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually. In her book Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood, journalist and science writer Lucy Jones describes it as a transition akin to adolescence, with comparable changes to the brain. The modern workplace, however, is not really designed to accommodate matrescence. Its not just that women are uniquely impacted by pregnancy and childbirth; in many cases, they also disproportionately shoulder the burden of caregiving responsibilities. Even now, with so many companies offering more generous leave policies, men still take less leave. Most workplaces are simply not equipped to adequately support working mothers when they returnand concerns over showing bias or making shaky assumptions about their ambitions can put employers in a tricky position. Setting up support Close believes the first step is just increasing awareness of how working mothers are changed by the experience of matrescence. People don’t understand matrescence yet, so we have to get that language in our culture to really appreciate it, she says. There is this idea [that] you get your leave, and then you’re going to just bounce right back . . . Of course, it’s unique and individual to everybody. But even just having that language and the lens of itshe’s not coming back the same woman she was when she left. And can we give space for that? Can we be curious about that? For some employees, matrescence might precipitate a more radical shift. Many women do start wanting different things, Close says. What lights you up before might light you up differently. Sometimes that might mean they are going to just leave the company and go and try something new. Of course, despite common assumptions that a womans ambitions recede after having a baby, everyone responds to motherhood differently. But Close says companies should be more open to the idea that something may have shifted. Or at least give employees an opening to have a conversation about their priorities upon their return: both what they might need as they reacclimate, and how they hope to balance their ambitions alongside their caregiving responsibilities. That might also include having a follow-up conversation a few months down the road, to check in and reevaluate. Most women that I talk to want that, says Close, who works with clients both as a therapist and motherhood coach. They are fulfilled in work. They don’t want to stay at home. They want to find a way to integrate this and make it work. But because it’s not understood in the workforce and in their organizations, they aren’t fully supported. Navigating a transformation While parental leave policies and other caregiver benefits can amount to lip service at certain companies, it remains a crucial offering for many employees, as well as an opportunity for companies to talk about issues that might impact working parents. A company that wants to highlight the challenges faced by mothers returning to the workplace could, for example, bring in people to speak on the subject for a “lunch and learn event. When employers dont leave room for much dialogue about their career ambitions, it also makes it that much more difficult for working mothers to raise concerns. If I’m not feeling supported, now I have to vocalize it, Close says. So the more that people understand, the safer it’s going to be for a mom to have the confidence to say: I know it’s not me and I’m not failing. This is what I need. In fact, companies should see this as an opportunity to cultivate loyalty and strong leadership skills. The experience of matrescence can be a real positive transformation for women, Close says, one that gives them greater clarity on their values and priorities. The juggling act of early motherhood enhances their ability to manage competing priorities in a way that can prove exceptionally useful in the workplace. She’s now juggling many, many things, and her whole bodyher physiologyis managing that, and developing it, and getting good at it, she says. Were missing out on potential great leaders if they just feel unsupported and end up leaning out. The costs of failing to support There are long-term consequences when companies fail to develop those employees, well beyond the acute transformation of early motherhood. In their initial years of child-rearing, working mothers may need more flexibility in their schedules and seek out greater work-life balance. But the motherhood penalty can affect how companies perceive those women further along in their careers, as their children grow older and they want to pour themselves into their work. There are a lot of women who are kind of at the later stages of motherhood, where they have a lot to offer, Close says. They have more energy, they have more space, and they have gained those skills. After all, theres a real cost when companies are unable to retain these workers. In the years since the pandemicwhich drove many working mothers out of their jobsthe number of women in the workforce had surpassed pre-pandemic levels. But last year, that trend started to reverse: In the first half of 2025, about 212,000 women exited the workforce, and a Washington Post analysis found that the share of working mothers between the ages of 25 and 44 had dipped by nearly three percentage points. The December jobs report cemented this shift as 81,000 workers left the labor forceall of whom were women, according to the National Womens Law Center. When moms come to see me, they’re cracking, or the’re burnt out, Close says. A big part of what I do is to just say: What you’re going through is normal, and it’s expected, and it’s not a personal, individual failure. What a world it would be if we all understood that, and companies and bosses and CEOs could make space for that and be supportive. We’d have a lot more moms [who] are thriving.
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For many women in the U.S. and around the world, motherhood comes with career costs. Raising children tends to lead to lower wages and fewer work hours for mothersbut not fathersin the United States and around the world. As a sociologist, I study how family relationships can shape your economic circumstances. In the past, Ive studied how motherhood tends to depress womens wages, something social scientists call the motherhood penalty. I wondered: Can government programs that provide financial support to parents offset the motherhood penalty in earnings? A motherhood penalty I set out with Therese Christensen, a Danish sociologist, to answer this question for moms in Denmarka Scandinavian country with one of the worlds strongest safety nets. Several Danish policies are intended to help mothers stay employed. For example, subsidized child care is available for all children from 6 months of age until they can attend elementary school. Parents pay no more than 25% of its cost. But even Danish moms see their earnings fall precipitously, partly because they work fewer hours. Losing $9,000 in the first year In an article to be published in an upcoming issue of European Sociological Review, Christensen and I showed that mothers increased income from the statesuch as from child benefits and paid parental leaveoffset about 80% of Danish moms average earnings losses. Using administrative data from Statistics Denmark, a government agency that collects and compiles national statistics, we studied the long-term effects of motherhood on income for 104,361 Danish women. They were born in the early 1960s and became mothers for the first time when they were 20-35 years old. They all became mothers by 2000, making it possible to observe how their earnings unfolded for decades after their first child was born. While the Danish governments policies changed over those years, paid parental leave and child allowances and other benefits were in place throughout. The women were, on average, age 26 when they became mothers for the first time, and 85% had more than one child. We estimated that motherhood led to a loss of about the equivalent of US$9,000 in womens earningswhich we measured in inflation-adjusted 2022 U.S. dollarsin the year they gave birth to or adopted their first child, compared with what we would expect if they had remained childless. While the motherhood penalty got smaller as their children got older, it was long-lasting. The penalty only fully disappeared 19 years after the women became moms. Motherhood also led to a long-term decrease in the number of the hours they worked. Studying whether government can fix it These annual penalties add up. We estimated that motherhood cost the average Danish woman a total of about $120,000 in earnings over the first 20 years after they first had childrenabout 12% of the money they would have earned over those two decades had they remained childless. Most of the mothers in our study who were employed before giving birth were eligible for four weeks of paid leave before giving birth and 24 weeks afterward. They could share up to 10 weeks of their paid leave with the babys father. The length and size of this benefit has changed over the years. The Danish government also offers child benefitspayments made to parents of children under 18. These benefits are sometimes called a child allowance. Denmark has other policies, like housing allowances, that are available to all Danes, but are more generous for parents with children living at home. Using the same data, Christensen and I next estimated how motherhood affects how much money Danish moms receive from the government. We wanted to know whether they get enough income from the government to compensate for their loss of income from their paid work. We found that motherhood leads to immediate increases in Danish moms government benefits. In the year they first gave birth to or adopted a child, women received over $7,000 more from the government than if they had remained childless. That money didnt fully offset their lost earnings, but it made a substantial dent. The gap between the money that mothers received from the government, compared with what they would have received if they remained childless, faded in the years following their first birth or adoption. But we detected a long-term bump in income from government benefits for motherseven 20 years after they first become mothers. Cumulatively, we determined that the Danish government offset about 80% of the motherhood earnings penalty for the women we studied. While mothers lost about $120,000 in earnings compared with childless women over the two decades after becoming a mother, they gained about $100,000 in government benefits, so their total income loss was only about $20,000. Benefits for parents of older kids Our findings show that government benefits do not fully offset earnings losses for Danish moms. But they help a lot. Because most countries provide less generous parental benefits, Denmark is not a representative case. It is instead a test case that shows whats possible when governments make financially supporting parents a high priority. That is, strong financial support for mothers from the government can make motherhood more affordable and promote gender equality in economic resources. Because the motherhood penalty is largest at the beginning, government benefits targeted to moms with infants, such as paid parental leave, may be especially valuable. Child care subsidies can also help mothers return to work faster. The motherhood penaltys long-term nature, however, indicates that these short-term benefits are not enough to get rid of it altogether. Benefits that are available to all mothers of children under 18, such as child allowances, can help offset the lon-term motherhood penalty for mothers of older children. Alexandra Killewald is a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Elon Musk just created the worlds most valuable private company. And he didnt do it through rapid growth or a new product launchat least not directly, anyway. Instead, as reported this week, Musk merged his artificial intelligence startup xAI into his wildly successful rocket company, SpaceX. Combined together, the two companies are now valued at an estimated $1.25 trillion. Its the biggest merger in history. And because Musk controls both companies, he calls most of the shots when it comes to the deal. A sci-fi twist At first glance, the connection between rockets and AI seems tenuous at best. But dig deeper into Musks big picture goals, and the merger starts to make a lot more senseeven if theres a decidedly sci-fi twist. SpaceX has made a name for itself by building gigantic, reusable rockets that deliver satellites into orbit for cheap. The company also delivers people and cargo to the International Space Station on behalf of NASA. Thats a lucrative business. SpaceXs rockets are now Americas main method of getting things into orbit, and its cheap satellites have fueled the success of Starlink, Musks space-based Internet service. Fully 95% of the things America launches into space are now put there by SpaceX. Simultaneously, Musks xAI has been hard at work building Large Language Models, like its core Grok model. Although xAI isnt as well known or widely used as dominant players like OpenAI, its models still perform well in industry benchmarks, putting the company on the Large Language Model leaderboard. Training models is expensive, though, not least because of the cost of electricity, and the challenges of finding room in data centers here on planet earth. That challenge likely hints at Musks deeper reason for merging his two companies. Musk has previously pushed for the idea of launching data centers into space, a long-held, sci-fi-escque dream of his. This sounds outlandish, but its becoming a surprisingly mainstream concept. Computers on satellites in orbit would benefit from plentiful, free solar energy. They could also potentially cool their chips by transferring heat into space, avoiding the insane power (and water) usage of terrestrial data centers. The lack of cooling equipment and grid infrastructure means these orbital data centers could be smaller than those on earth. And they wouldnt need to take up valuable real estate here on the ground. By beaming their data back to earth, a constellation of data center satellites could greatly reduce the cost of training and operating Large Language Models. That could give a third-tier LLM company like Grok a huge advantage over its competitors. Musk may also have an easier time recruiting talent for the well-respected SpaceX than for xAI. And he could use lucrative government contracts for orbital launches to fund AI development. All of this will take time to develop, of course. But given Musks track record (for engineering at least, if perhaps not social network administration), the idea of flying data centers could come to fruition sooner than imagined. When Musk said he would build reusable rockets that could land themselves upright, people mocked him. Today, thats a key part of what makes SpaceX successful, and its being widely copied by companies and governments. The same rapid development cycle could apply to orbital supercomputers, too. In the short term, there are other advantages of merging the companies. Starlink customers will likely see more AI tools built into their Internet subscriptions. Musk might also be planning to build more AI into his government contracts, including those in the defense space. Companies like Palantir make billions by selling AI services in the defense sector. Musk may be looking to use his existing SpaceX connections to get in on the opportunity. Not a done deal The deal isnt officially done yet. Regulators could still balk at the idea of creating a mega company at Musks desired scale. And because the X social network sits under the xAI umbrella, concerns about Musks control of both information and access to space could crater the deal on national security grounds. Still, assuming the merger goes ahead, Musk could have an unprecedented level of control over two of the 21st centurys most promising technologies. And, he would have an unprecedented ability to combine those technologies together.
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