Momartfully

God Rest We Weary Working Moms

Every working mom sings the same song this time of year;

 

Debi Stack is hilarious. And awesome.

Google ate the working moms

It's been eight months since Currentmom asked "Where are the real working moms?"

I've come up with a theory; Google ate the working moms.

Let me explain.

A little less than a year ago Mama bee wrote about how working moms are invisible. Despite working moms being over 70% of the population of mothers working mothers are not considered "typical" or "normal" mothers by most in the media.

Instead a minority of mothers - higher income and predominatly white women who write in blogs are regarded as the "typical" moms - as representative of all moms. Whenever a "mom issue" is covered in the news or radio or print or online or on TV the same small group of mommybloggers will be trotted out to address mom "issues" and speak for all women with children - as if having children makes us all the same cookie-cutter model. Interestingly, we don't see the same five men being trotted out to speak for all fathers - even if they're bloggers... or not.

I have a theory about how we got here - with the invisible majority - and my theory is grounded in  experience in the world of media production and in long experience with online marketing.

The Pitch

Imagine the life of a hungry reporter or PA... let's say you're a twentysomething hungry PA, fresh out of college and you've been given the chance of a lifetime - you get to pitch a story for a television show or an article that could be professionally published. You've been told your topic has to be contentious, geared toward the daytime television market or for the audience that controls household spending - and your topic has to pull in viewership. Huge viewership. You're told to maybe try a "mom topic" - but you're not a mom. You don't know anything about modern moms - none of your friends are moms... so what do you do?

Desperately, you turn to a resource you think has all the answers - a search engine. You Google "mom debate" or "mommy wars" or another "mom topic". Google (or Bing, I'm equal opportunity, after all) feeds you a brilliant, long list of "mom bloggers" and links that you can use for your pitch. You check the blog links and all the moms indicate on their blogs that they'd love to entertain any offers to speak to the media.

Perfect - you've got someone to provide content. Extra bonus points if they're going to pull in their blog traffic to your story.

You the reporter or PA never look past the second page of search results. You've got two or three likely candidates, and you're not going to spend time vetting those candidates or digging deeper. You've got names, now you can pitch.

In reality, you don't really care about the authority or expertise of the person who will speak. What you're looking for is traffic - or better yet a contentious viewpoint. To you, a non-mother, it looks like giving birth makes anyone an "expert" on "mom issues" for every mom on the planet. Giving  birth is the only qualifier - and the only measure of authority is search engine results.

The problem is that Google isn't representative of authority, expertise, or population - but millions of people think that the results are. If Google says it, it must be so.

I'm saying this as a professional web publisher - I've created SEO strategies, I worked on the inside of a BIG search engine (as a reviewer). Search engines have never indicated authority or expertise on topics. Search engine results indicate marketing activities, keyword buys, and all the heavily massaged, manipulated and populated data of those with enough time to build a search optimization strategy.

In short popularity - not authority.

The new authority is search engine ranking - not experience - not scholarly expertise - not wisdom or longevity.

Which is why I laughed, a lot, when Twitter recently told me that Dooce was "Similar to You". I don't have anything against Heather, but we are not similar. Yes - we've both been blogging forever, but she enjoys a very rare work at home situation for a very high income, with a paid assistant - while I have the much more typical experience of being a working full-time, out of the home mom, for a very typical income and no paid help.

Heather is a celebrity who earns an income, but she's not a typical working mom - she's never written a thing about the issues that plague most working moms. Yet, Heather is  considered an authority on working moms by many media outlets.

Work it

Working moms have also become invisible for another reason - semantics.

There has been an ongoing campaign to "redefine" the term "working mom". It is no longer acceptable to indicate a paid, out of the home career with the term "working" because of the popularity of the bumper sticker philosophy "all moms are working moms". The goal of this quip is to elevate every mother by giving them all credit for working - by diminishing the work of working mothers.

Working moms have had the term "working" stolen from us - we're not allowed to use the word "work" out of fear of backlash from those who have co-opted the word. We are not allowed to say what we are.

Blogs from moms with full-time careers (hi!) are almost impossible to find - because every mom calls herself a "working mom" now.* Hobbies with tiny incomes or no income but lots of goods-in-trade are now equated to full-time careers. Everybody's "working" at home. Volunteering is now "working". Hobbies are "working". Everything is "work"... except work.

Working moms need working moms

Working moms understand working moms - and we need to hear from moms with experience and authority in this topic - other working moms. We need to find a different way to network working moms that doesn't rely on marketing massages and popularity contests. Search engines will never be a resource for working moms who want to find each other - working moms don't have the time to massage our search results - we need to find each other quickly and build our network so that we can speak for ourselves.

* Yes, motherhood is hard - I didn't say it wasn't. The word "working" doesn't indicate "hard" or "difficult". Working indicates working - why is it that can we use the word "working" as a adjective for all nouns except "mom"?

The Caps for Good Campaign

I'll be participating in the "Caps for Good" campaign
from November 2010 - February 2011;

Caps for Good will run from November, 2010 through February, 2011 and will call on knitters and crocheters of all ages and ability levels to help protect infants in some of the word’s poorest countries so they survive the critical first month of life. (Warm Up America)

I'll be cranking out baby hats as quickly as I can - both crochet and knit. Join me by making hats, or make a donation to the "Caps for Good" campaign. Help all of us provide newborns with hats to help improve infant survivability.

I will also be offering first pick of the hats I produce to my friends and family members who would like a hand-crafted hat.