At the national level, women make up nearly half of the workforce and more than 70% of moms with young children work. At the same time, women earned only 82% of what men earned in 2017, and only 5.2% of the S&P 500 companies' chief executives are women.
Conditions for working mothers can vary at the state level, given differences in policy and local infrastructure quality. In order to determine which states provide the most benefit to working mothers, WalletHub has compared state dynamics across 15 metrics in three core categories: child care, professional opportunities, and work-life balance. The child care metric included quality, costs, and pediatricians per capita, professional opportunities included the gender pay gap and share of female executives, and the work-life balance metric includes parental leave policies and average commute times.
Vermont, which ranks first overall, ranks first in professional opportunities and has the lowest gender pay gap. It also ranks third in child care and fifth in work-life balance. Rhode Island ranks first for work-life balance and sixth overall, and Minnesota ranks first for child care and second overall. Idaho, Louisiana, and Alabama rank lowest.
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