Reply #9: Pay is not determined by what you do

[taught_me_patience]

it is determined by supply and demand of the labor market willing to do the work. High demand jobs + low number of people qualified to do the work = high pay. If we examine the salaries of people who actually do a very similar job to stay-at-home moms (nannys, teachers, etc), we see that the pay is not nearly close to what the article claims. In fact, I'd probably venture to guess that the pay is closer to 1/4 what the article claims. The problem is, there is very little actual skill involved in being a stay-at-home mom. Almost 50% of the population is able to do the job! This "study" was performed by salary.com... probably to try to get traffic to their website.