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LinkedIn Is Adding 'Stay-At-Home Mum' As An Official Job Title

Kimberley Bond

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LinkedIn Is Adding 'Stay-At-Home Mum' As An Official Job Title

Featured Image Credit: Unsplash

LinkedIn has announced that it will now include 'stay-at-home mum' and 'stay-at-home dad' as official job titles.

The professional social networking site has chosen to remove an old requirement that said job titles needed to be linked to an employer to allow for parents to accurately reflect their employment history.

Before this change, some parents were left unable to explain any large gaps on their CVs on LinkedIn, which could lead to difficulties when trying to re-enter the competitive jobs market.

Stay at home dad is also an option (Credit: Unsplash)
Stay at home dad is also an option (Credit: Unsplash)
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It's great news for any parents wanting to return to the workplace, as many employers don't consider being a stay-at-home parent as an comparable to a salaried role.

In reality, being a full-time parent is equivalent to working two full-time jobs; a recent study by Welch's found that stay-at-home mums work for an average of 98 hours a week.

The 98-hour work week was calculated by using the fact that the mums in the study, on average, started their days at 6:23am, with family duties lasting until 8:31pm. If you multiply those 14 hours by seven days in a week, the total comes to a staggering 98 hours.

LinkedIn has since swapped up its options to cater for parenthood (Credit: Unsplash)
LinkedIn has since swapped up its options to cater for parenthood (Credit: Unsplash)
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LinkedIn decided to make this change to their network after the platform was criticised on blogging platform Medium for not giving enough options for applicants who had to bow out of work.

"Strikingly, there are zero pre-populated options on LinkedIn to identify maternity leave, parental leave, adoption leave, sick leave, bereavement leave, elderly care leave, or for long term injury/illness, education/re-training, volunteering, long term travel, a gap year, a sabbatical - or for a pandemic," writer Heather Bolen explained.

Now, mothers and fathers can say they work full-time as parents (Credit: Unsplash)
Now, mothers and fathers can say they work full-time as parents (Credit: Unsplash)

"LinkedIn's silence is tantamount to a 'don't ask, don't tell policy,' in which employers and prospective employees dance around the topic of family, thereby preventing meaningful conversations about workplace policies that could better support the hiring, productivity, job satisfaction, and retention of employees who are also primary caretakers."

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Responding to the criticism in Fortune, LinkedIn's director of engineering Bef Ayenew explained: "I wholeheartedly agree that we need to normalise employment gaps on the profile to help reframe hiring conversations."

He confirmed the company's decision to add "stay-at-home mum" and "stay-at-home dad" as job titles - just as it has emerged that 54 per cent of overall job losses in the UK were women.

Topics: UK News, Life News, Life, Technology

Kimberley Bond
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