Does being a mom make you more productive at work?

You wouldn't think that in 2016 we'd still be talking about the treatment of women in the workplace. But unfortunately, we are. Over the years on Spark, we've looked the lack of women in venture capitalist-backed tech startups, as well as the treatment of women in startups. We've seen online harassment continue to be a massive problem.

And then there's the wage gap. In the US, the average woman earns 80 cents for every dollar a man earns in a comparable job. Statistics Canada's most recent numbers have Canadian women who work full-time earning only 73.5 cents for every dollar men make.

We've still got a long way to go, baby.  

Just this past week in Iceland, thousands of women there walked out of their workplaces at 2:38 p.m - the actual time of day when they technically begin working for free, at least compared to men. Icelandic women have made this same protest every single year since 1975, and yet they still earn only 86 cents for every dollar a man earns.

Aaaannnd, we're in it for the long haul apparently. According to a new report by the World Economic Forum, globally, the economic gap between men and women is actually growing, even as the gap in other measures, like education, is shrinking. The report says worldwide it may take 170 years to close the gap.

There's ongoing research, decades long, across disciplines, looking at motherhood and its relation to women in the workplace: Studies that show that in spite of what's commonly thought, so-called "baby brain" is a myth.

There are findings that challenge the view that women with children are less ambitious in their careers. A recent Women in the Workplace study  found mothers are actually 15% more interested in becoming a top executive than women without children.

That's right, more ambitious. In fact, it may even be that motherhood is an efficiency hack. The thinking here is that if, as a parent, you have to juggle a lot of things at once, that could translate to being really efficient in the workplace. Some study findings have shown that parents -- and especially mothers -- are actually more productive over their careers than people who don't have children.

Christian Zimmermann is the Assistant Vice President of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. They did a study looking at parenthood and productivity.

"What we saw is that the small-child penalty is not that big, and that there is an advantage, a small advantage, but there is an advantage in productivity later in life." Christian says.

Now to be clear, Christian and his team studied economists, which is a very specific kind of job and group of people. And there are obvious limitations to this, making it hard to generalize when compared to other kinds of careers.

But we still think it's interesting to look at how we might structure the workplace, any workplace, to take into account the women -- or men -- who have more of the responsibility for child care.  Simple as that.