No, this is really quite a clever idea: very much killing two birds with one stone type of clever thinking. So let us take two of our current societal problems.

The first is the Mommy Track and that way that it feeds through into the gender pay gap. We know from previous looks at this that when (if, but the problem applies in a less serious form to those who might in the future) women take a career break to have and possibly to raise children, it’s very difficult for them to get that career back afterwards. Part of it is simply less experience than those who didn’t take the break, part of it is the continuing desire for greater flexibility (and possibly shorter hours) that having children creates. There was most certainly also direct discrimination in earlier decades: how much of this remains appears nowadays to be more of a polticial question than an empirical one.

But as we know, it is this motherhood gap which is responsible (again in larger or smaller part to taste) for the difference in average wages between men and women. There’s also research showing that women who do take part time jobs, in order to have the flexibility they desire, don’t work at the same high-powered level they did before they took the break and had children: so there’s education and training, human capital in the jargon, going unused, something which makes us all poorer.

OK, that’s problem one. Problem two is that we can clearly see that regulation of financial markets and the banking system has been wanting. It’s not so much the external regulation which is wanting though: at least, not in my rather free market opinion. It’s the internal regulation, of the banks and finance houses themselves: it’s entirely obvious that all too many managements didn’t understand what it was that their own employees were doing.

So, Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism makes the suggestion that the banks create a Mommy Track all of their own. Not like the standard one, not at all. Rather, as a way to make the best use of those valuable skills, as a way to use all of that expensively trained human capital, while those mothers desire to have perhaps part time or at least not the brutal 70 hour banking work weeks.

Offer the mothers the chance to be the internal regulators while they are raising their small children. This keeps them in the marketplace, keeps their contacts and knowledge fresh, while allowing them to raise the next generation. It also provides a pool of experienced labor to do that oh so needed regulating: and as an added extra bonus it’ll, in banking at least, help to close the gender pay gap.

Women who’ve performed well in the City or the Street often find it impossible to work out part-time positions when they want to have children, except in those rare admin jobs that require substantive knowledge. You can get good women on the cheap with well-designed mommie track roles. Regulators should sit up and take notice.

An excellent and seriously good idea: not that this means anyone will take any notice, of course, even if they should.