Lady Business: LinkedIn’s new resume line for stay-at-home parents

Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 125th issue, published April 4, 2021.
 

Caretaker Credit

Happy spring! April has already brought a little good news about the women’s employment crisis that I’ve been covering for the past several months: As vaccinations accelerate and businesses re-open (unfortunately not always in that order), some women are rejoining the U.S. workforce. Not very many—there are still “almost 2 million women” who left the labor force since the onset of the pandemic, instead of “more than 2 million”—but it’s a small step, right?
 
I broke a bit of news about another small but important step for working women this week: LinkedIn is changing how stay-at-home parents can describe their time out of the workforce—and some of the changes are in response to my reporting. As I wrote for Fortune:
 

For years, mothers who've temporarily stopped working have asked LinkedIn for more ways to reflect a caregiving hiatus on their public, digital resumes.

Now they’re finally getting some better options. On Tuesday, the Microsoft-owned professional social network is introducing several new job titles, including “stay-at-home mom,” to allow full-time parents and other caretakers to provide more accurate descriptions of their time away from the paid labor force. LinkedIn is also removing its requirement that any resume entry—for example, “stay-at-home dad”—must be linked to a specific company or employer.

LinkedIn made these changes after Fortune asked for comment, earlier this month, on a Medium post criticizing the social network’s lack of flexible language or profile options for women who leave the labor force. More than 2.3 million women have done so in the past year alone, as the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools and daycares and decimated the service-oriented businesses that employ majority-female workforces.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked LinkedIn about this viral Medium post by Heather Bolen, who criticized the company for only allowing stay-at-home moms and dads to describe themselves as “homemakers.” (“I wouldn’t have dared insert homemaker on my LinkedIn profile to describe my time out of the paid workforce,” and “I didn’t think recruiters or employers would give me a second glance with the homemaker headline,” she wrote.)
 
“There shouldn’t be shame in trying to be open about taking time off and then wanting to come back,” Bolen told me. “That’s even more the case with the pandemic, and all the women leaving the workforce.”
 
I’ll let others debate whether “homemaker” or “stay-at-home mom” is a preferable professional description, as the latter label also has its critics. ("Stay-at-home dad" and "stay-at-home parent" are also new options.) And LinkedIn says it was already working on bigger, more gender-neutral fixes for how users’ professional profiles can reflect parental leave, family care leave, and other employment sabbaticals; those changes will be rolling out those changes in coming months.
 
But while it’s working on some of those longer-term fixes, LinkedIn decided to make immediate changes as a “stopgap solution” in response to Bolen’s essay and my inquiry about it. As Bef Ayenew, director of engineering at LinkedIn, told me: “We need to normalize employment gaps on the profile to help reframe hiring conversations.”
 

Lady Bits

 
—“I can’t write about my name without writing about racism, and I can’t write about racism without writing about violence. …Of course, my children worry. We’ve all been worried for years.”
 
—"We still live in a culture that doesn’t see straight white men as having a political identity, or being capable of bias—they’re the default.” And the Washington Post continues to be Really Bad at This!
 
—Related to the creation of this newsletter, and the company that distributes it: So sometimes you’re reporting a story about a company where the founder-CEO and all the top executives acknowledge that they have work to do on diversity, and that’s not the main point of the story, but you can’t help but notice that the C-suite is very white and the office seems pretty bro-y. Like, “our conference room is named after a famous strip club” bro-y! And then years later, you’re grateful that some of those observations made it into the final story, because oh boy. (At the same time: I’ve occasionally contemplated moving this newsletter over to Substack, where all the cool kids are—but also, oh boy.)
 
—"It was terrible to see Grant so often reduced and diminished, with no biography to challenge the others.” On Jane Grant, co-founder of the New Yorker and the first woman reporter at the New York Times (which, sigh, characterized her co-founder role as “helping her husband” in its 1972 obituary. Headline: “Jane Grant Dead; Aided Magazine.”)
 
Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com