Mothers should earn $134k a year?

First, a brief description of their methodology: they surveyed mothers for the top 10 equivalent jobs and then pro-rated their salaries by the number of hours the mothers reported doing the equivalent jobs. This gives you the following table:

So, the first thing you should notice is that some of the equivalences here are deeply silly. Probably the worst is "CEO". To the extent that a mother's role in the household is like a CEO's role in a company, it's a very small company. Prorating $35K/year at 4.2 hours to a 40 hour workweek gives you an annual salary of $350K or so, which is a lot more than the CEO of your average 4-person company makes. Facilities manager and psychologist are pretty lame too. There's a big difference between seeing patients in a professional capacity and consoling your children when their boyfriends break up with them. This point is important because these three jobs alone account for less than 16% of the hours that stay-at-home mothers are claimed to work but over 50% of the total imputed salary, so if you use more comparable positions the numbers drop quite a bit.

Even with this fudging of the numbers, the imputed salary is only $105k. To get up to $134k, they have to count "overtime" (time and a half) for the hours worked over 40 hours a week. But of course most jobs that pay well (e.g., CEO) are salaried, exempt, positions, so you don't get paid overtime. Nice bit of double-counting there.

The final problem is that this whole notion of equivalent salaries that includes domestic work is kind of problematic as a comparative notion, unless you also remember to add it into the imputed salaries of the people comparing against. I.e., I make $X/year but I do $Y/year worth of housework, so we have to remember that when we compare against the Stay-at-Home-Mom's imputed salary. We all do lots of stuff for ourselves (or others) that we could pay somebody else to do, so just adding that stuff into the Mom's calculation to compare it against people's actual monetary salaries is quite misleading. Just because you changed a lightbulb doesn't mean you get to claim that you're working as an electrician.

None of this is to dispute that mothers, whether Stay-At-Home or Working (yeah, yeah, every mother is a working mother, but you know what I mean) work hard. I know a number of them and clearly they do. However, the computation Salary.com offers doesn't really advance our understanding of that in any way, though it does appear to have accomplished the more important goal of getting them news coverage.