CT Ranks 3rd Among States for Working Mothers, Analysis Finds

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The best place to be for working mothers is the Northeast, as Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Vermont took the top four rankings in a new analysis.

Connecticut, which placed third, in the overall rankings, made the top 10 in all three categories, ranking 3rd in Child Care, 5th in Work-Life Balance, and 10th in Professional Opportunities.  The state was one of only three to earn top-10 rankings in all three.

The analysis, by the financial website WalletHub, compared state dynamics across 16 key metrics – grouped into the three categories -  to identify the Best & Worst States for Working Moms.

Also earning a slot in the top 10 overall were D.C., New Jersey, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Washington state.  At the bottom of the list were South Carolina, Alabama and Louisiana.

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Women make up nearly half of the U.S. workforce, WalletHub points out, and more than 70 percent of mothers with young children are working. In 2018, the labor force participation rate of mothers with children under age 6, at 65.1 percent, was lower than the rate of those whose youngest child was age 6 to 17, at 76.4 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The labor force participation rate — the percent of the population working or looking for work — for all women with children under age 18 was 71.5 percent in 2018, up from 71.1 percent in the prior year.

Yet women earned only 85 percent of what men made in 2018 nationwide and have far less upward mobility, as evidenced by the fact that only 4.8 percent of S&P 500 companies’ chief executives are female, the WalletHub summary notes.

Among the metrics reviewed, Connecticut placed:

  •  5th – % of Single-Mom Families in Poverty

  • 7th – Avg. Length of Woman’s Workday (in Hours)

  • 8th – Parental-Leave Policy Score

  • 10th – Gender Pay Gap (Women’s Earnings as % of Men’s)

  • 12th – Pediatricians per Capita

  • 19th – Median Women’s Salary (Adjusted for Cost of Living)

  • 21st – Ratio of Female Executives to Male Executives

Last month, an analysis of the best places for female entrepreneurs ranked Connecticut as 4th best in the nation. That analysis of census data was done by Seek Business Capital.

Data used to create this ranking were collected from the U.S. Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Child Care Aware of America, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Council for Community and Economic Research, Institute for Women's Policy Research, National Partnership for Women & Families and WalletHub research.