If you’re familiar with the novel “Where’d you go Bernadette?” by Maria Semple (”I heard Bernadette tried to run you over at pickup!”) or the book “People I Want to Punch in the Throat” by Jen Mann (”...that dreaded school pick-up line. I f*#k it up every single time.”) you know that parents love to discuss the social phenomenon of school pick-up and drop-off. The topic even pops up in HBO’s new series “Big Little Lies” (”Bit of a line here.” (horn honks) “Oh, it'll move quickly. We just drop and go. They've got it down to a science.” “Oh, we don't go in?” “No, we just drop them off. They can't be bothered with the parents now.”)
But all joking aside (and there is certainly lots to joke about—I’m definitely guilty of #4 from this list), school pick-up and drop-off is one of countless examples of “unpaid work” done by parents everyday.
Note that I intentionally did not say done by “mothers.” There’s a common belief in our culture is that driving your children is primarily a mom’s job.
But at Pogo Rides, we don’t share in this belief.
And Melinda Gates doesn’t either.
She talks about how she and Bill unintentionally caused “cultural change” in her school community by having Bill— then CEO of Microsoft — drive their daughter to school two days a week. Melinda was a full-time parent at the time. As she described, this caused a frenzy with the mothers in the school who went home and said to their spouse, “If Bill Gates is driving his daughter to school, you darn well better drive our kids to school!”
So why is this so important?
Globally, women perform an average of 4.5 hours of unpaid work a day—double what their male counterparts perform. And as a society, we pay for this. According to the O.E.C.D, “when the time women spend on unpaid work shrinks to three hours from five hours, their labor forces participation increased 20 percent." By simply sharing family responsibilities, our economy grows.
As Melinda Gates said, "If we can add 10 trillion dollars to the GDP by looking at the unpaid work that happens at home and really calling it what it is - work - to me it doesn’t make any sense that we’re sitting in 2016 and we’re not labeling it like this. Why don’t we call it work and then why don’t we recognize the women who are predominantly doing it?"
And that’s exactly our mission.
We’re pushing against the notion that driving kids to school and activities has no monetary value. We think parents should have more options than simply working outside the home for pay and working for the family for free. Their time is worth money—no matter how society views it.
So at Pogo, we’ve created “Community Rides,” to promote the ”cultural change” needed to shift our thinking, to value the time of all parents, to balance the workload, to improve our communities—and of course, to help get those kiddos to their 5:00 pm soccer practice (conveniently scheduled smack dab in the middle of rush hour traffic.)
#WeGotThis
