Working Mom or Stay At Home Mom? Who wants to know?

I find it curious and interesting that questionnaires that do not 'require' or 'need' such information ask for this information. Why does a doctor's office need to differentiate whether a woman is a working mom or a stay at home mom? Does the care for that person or a child hinge or depend on what that woman allegedly does for a living?

How about this for a possibility? Woman of both sorts (and likely there are other 'categories' in which women don't fit) work really hard. Working women oftentimes work full time. If a child gets sick or if there are different arrangements for school schedules (i.e. holidays), a mom has to take time off work (to which many supervisors participate in eye-rolling and sometimes assume the mom is not as dedicated to work) or find someone and pay that person to take care of the child. They have precious little time with their children - at most a few hours, once off work - to interact with their children, participate in activities with them, before the children have to eat dinner, go through the bed-time routine and go to bed. Working outside of the home is exhausting and finding the energy to take care of everything in the home after work is challenging. These women, working women, are essentially working a minimum of two full time jobs: at work and at home. One often doesn't end at the office, and one requires being on-call 24/7.

Stay-at-home-moms have life rough, too. Who in the world came up with the image that these women sit at home, eating bonbons and watching movies? Those people ought to be slapped (back into reality). These women do not get paid (not even one pretty penny) for the work they do: laundry, cook, wash dishes, clean, tend children, take care of the yard, transport children. You know there are occupations (and titles to go with them) where people get PAID to do many of those tasks, right? Laundering services, chefs (yes, there are personal chefs out there), nannies (or babysitters or au pairs), lawn services, chauffeurs. And these women who end up attempting to reenter the work force are told that the work they did in the home does not "count." We are in the 21st century and stay-at-home moms work jobs that are pretty much thankless jobs, except to other fellow stay-at-home moms and a precious few others.

So, help me (figure out), why do these impersonal organizations want to know what a woman does for a living? Is it really that organization's business at all? Are we merely looking for other ways to pick on people?!