Are women opting out of the workforce?
Childcare, wages factor into moms leaving career track during pandemic
If day cares closed because of the novel coronavirus, Aimee Rae Hannaford thought her family would fare better than most.
She worked full time as the chief executive of a tech company while her husband stayed home. He’d been taking some time off from his own tech career, managing a rental property while considering his options. He could look after their 3-year-old son, she thought — at least for a while.
“That lasted a grand total of three days,” Hannaford said.
Once her son was home full time, she realized they’d need a different solution. She was holed up in the guest room, wielding dual-monitors at her desk. Her husband was exhausted.
“I can’t do it,” she remembers him saying: “I can’t watch him for this long.”
Hannaford, 46, had been logging 70-hour weeks for years — and she was proud of the work she’d done. When she started her career in San Francisco, she was one of two women at a video game company. Eventually she came to run a company she co-founded, building opensource websites for clients like Stanford University and co-leading a 13-person team. She was intentional about hiring women, minorities and others who challenged Silicon Valley stereotypes.
Hannaford had long been planning to take six weeks off. It would be a time free from computers and headphones, she’d promised her husband. She’d make bath bombs with her son and plant pumpkins in the backyard.
But it was never the right time. Her co-founder, busy with her own kids and aging parents, was able to help out less and less. Even outside work hours, Hannaford would field emails and take calls as her son, Ryan, climbed into her lap and tried to grab her phone. Her husband would plead with her to “get off the computer,” she said, teaching Ryan a trick to get her attention: When she wasn’t responding, her son would call her “Aimee” instead of “Mom.” (Hannaford’s husband declined to comment for this story.)
When the company lost a client because of the coronavirus, Hannaford realized she’d have to devote even more time to work. If she really pushed herself, she knew she could probably keep the company going even if day care closed. But could she ask her husband to handle 12-hour shifts of child care, with no help, no breaks and no clear end point? She wasn’t sure her family could survive that. She wasn’t sure he’d do it, even if she asked.
“I thought to myself, ‘I can carry this company forward, but I’m going to be so broken. My son will be so broken. My husband will be so broken.’”
Opting out
Women’s jobs — largely concentrated in service industries — are particularly vulnerable in the coronavirus economy. There’s evidence women are being laid off or furloughed at a significantly higher rate than men. But there is another threat to women’s paid labor that can be harder to see: With kids at home, and families forced to take on significantly more domestic labor, women are opting out of the workforce.
Nearly all the women interviewed for this story — who had either stopped working because of the virus, or were planning to — said the hiatus was temporary. Once schools and day-care centers reopen, they say, they plan to go back. It might not be so easy. On March 16, with schools and day cares on the verge of closing, Hannaford and her co-founder agreed to dissolve their company, laying off all their employees. Hannaford brought home eight of the office chairs, wheeling them into her dining room, one by one. Her family would live off their savings until the pandemic subsided.
In the end, Hannaford said, she felt she only had one option: “I had to choose being a mother and being at home.”
Across the country, most schools have been closed since the middle of March, with many day cares following soon after. While some day cares have started to reopen, few parents feel comfortable sending their kids, worried they may not be able to maintain proper social distancing. Other support systems for working families have disappeared, too: It’s not safe for grandpa to watch the kids three times a week; the neighbor had to cancel the standing weekly playdate. If a family has enough money to outsource other domestic tasks - house cleaning, laundry, dog walking - they’re probably doing all that themselves.
On top of everything else, parents are now expected to be teachers. While online learning programs vary wildly, few schools are offering more than a few hours of daily instruction. After that, parents are left to lesson plan the rest of the day. Families without a stable Internet connection are cut off from formal education.
It’s an impossible situation for caregivers who continue to go out to work, and for those who now work from home. There is not enough time to do everything. Families have to make tough choices: If a ball must be dropped, which one should it be? Chances are, in a heterosexual couple, it will be a woman’s paid labor.
“I’m an economist, so I usually try not to say things without data,” said Martha Gimbel, a manager of economic research at Schmidt Futures. “But I feel very comfortable going out on a limb and saying that this burden is going to fall on women. We just know it’s going to be women.”
The decision to quit is a privilege. Stay-at-home orders have forced many businesses to shutter or drastically scale back. Sixteen percent of women are currently unemployed, according to Labor Department data for the month of April. Fired and furloughed workers face their own set of tough decisions, fighting to keep their families financially afloat.
Even if they weren’t actually forced to leave their jobs, many working moms said the “choice”
to stop working didn’t really feel like a choice at all.
“How many layers of responsibility — how much weight — can you take on before you crumble?” Hannaford asked. “I think I did pretty well.”
A financial call
Ashley Fariss Stewart knew she would have to quit her job as soon as schools and day cares closed. It was never even really a question. Her husband, Craig Stewart, works full time in accounting, making far more money than she did working two days a week as an occupational therapist. Her paycheck was always “icing on the cake,” she said, barely covering the cost of child care for the hours she spent on the job.
“It just kind of came naturally,” said Fariss Stewart, 32, living in Goochland, Virginia. She has a 4-yearold son and 2-year-old twin daughters. The idea that her husband might scale back at his job, she said, “honestly didn’t even cross either of our minds.”
Farris Stewart loved her job. She’d put herself through a twoyear master’s program to get her certification. She’d go into schools, helping children with conditions such as autism and ADHD use the bathroom, or get themselves dressed. It would have been easier to quit when she had kids - there were days when she commuted 90 minutes each way, pumping breast milk while she drove - but she didn’t want to. She took a year off, then came back.
“Having a career, instead of just being ‘Henry’s mom’ or ‘Amelia’s mom’ — that meant something to me,” she said.
Craig said he cares about his wife’s personal fulfillment. Eventually, he hopes she will “find whatever it is she wants to do for her work-career piece,” he said. “I want her to be happy with that.”
But right now, he said, they need to make the best financial decision for their family.
Lauren Smith Brody, author of “The Fifth Trimester,” a manual for working moms, said couples all over the country are probably making similar calculations: When they’re deciding who should scale back at work, or quit altogether, they’ll be comparing salaries.
U.S. women, on average, still make 81 cents for every dollar a man makes, concentrated in industries that tend to pay less. (For many women of color, the wage gap is far greater: Black women make 62 cents to the white man’s dollar; Latinas make 54 cents.)
Social pressure
Moms are also more likely to leave their jobs during the pandemic because they feel pressure to be a “good mom,” said Caitlyn Collins, a sociologist of gender and families at Washington University in St. Louis.
Laura Reese, from Rockville, Maryland, has that fear. She worries that her daughters — ages 11 and 14 — are spending too much time on their phones. They’re constantly in their rooms, she said, sprawled out on the bed, scrolling through TikTok or Snapchat.
She’s read the stories about social media and teenage girls - how these apps make them compare themselves to other people, crippling their selfesteem. Her older daughter has seemed a little down lately, she said. “I feel like I’m neglecting my kids.”
Reese, 44, works 60-hour weeks as the director of marketing for a building company. She’s also divorced. If her family had a second income right now, she said, “I would 100% back away from my career and take care of my kids.”
There is no way she can stop working completely, Reese said. But if schools don’t open in the fall, she plans to make some major changes: find a job with fewer hours, and move to a less expensive area, so she can spend more time with her daughters. In the meantime, she’s been trying to get off Facebook.
“All these moms who are like, ‘I went on this hike with my daughter for two hours,’” Reese said. “I get so jealous. It looks like they’re all living their best lives, and I am crushed with work.”
Breanna Pompey, 23, has had time to be the kind of mom Reese envies. At home with her three kids — ages 4, 2, and 6 weeks — in North Liberty, Indiana, she’s been plopping Mentos in Coke bottles, watching them explode at the bottom of the driveway. She used to work full time at a United Federal Credit Union call center, filling unpredictable shifts at odd hours. She often came home just in time to put her kids to bed.
Pompey decided to quit even before day cares shut down. By early March, when the news started reporting on local coronavirus cases, Pompey was wondering whether day care was a safe place for her kids. Her fiance made the final decision.
“When it comes to the kids, he is very protective,” she said. “He was like, ‘No, this is not happening. We don’t know who the kids are going to be around.’”
Pompey could have seen herself working for the United Federal Credit Union for years. She’d never had much of a career before, working mostly short-term retail jobs.
Working for a credit union with call centers across the country, she saw positions to strive for. She’d already started moving up. In December, she’d applied for a position at a new branch in Reno. The hiring manager called a few days later, offering her the job. She would have her own office.
“You have to understand: I don’t win anything,” Pompey said. “To hear her say, ‘I want you. I want you to come here’ — I felt like I’d won the lottery.”
Once her fiance agreed to the move, she immediately started making plans, reserving the moving truck, boxing up nonessentials like summer clothes for the kids and their toys. The move was still weeks away, but “so what,” she said. They were going.
The first case of the coronavirus was reported in Indianapolis three weeks before Pompey was supposed to leave for Reno. With the kids at home, Pompey said, it just made sense that she would be the one to quit. They couldn’t realistically move across the country in the middle of a pandemic. Her fiance had a steady job working 60 hours a week as a roofer.
Of course she was disappointed, she said, but it wasn’t really that big of a loss.
Most of her paycheck had gone to day care, anyway.
Becoming obsolete
Even in normal, nonpandemic times, women struggle to reenter the workforce after leaving to take care of their kids. In 2003, Lisa Belkin declared the dawn of an “Opt-Out Revolution” for college-educated women in a blockbuster cover story for the New York Times Magazine. Ten years later, the revolution had run its course, the paper announced in a follow-up story by Judith Warner, and women wanted back in.
The trouble was, the workforce had changed. Their old jobs required new skills. Their networks had decayed over time. What they wanted out of a job had changed, too. Most women did not want to return to the kind of grueling work schedule they’d had before they left. They wanted the flexibility to work from home, or leave early to pick their kids up from school.
“The risk of leaving the workplace is so high. There are real costs,” said Pamela Stone, a professor of sociology at Hunter College, who wrote “Opting Out?” in 2007 and “Opting Back In” in 2019, tracking a group of highly educated women who chose to leave the workforce. “Especially in a job that requires formal experience and knowledge, you can become quickly obsolete.”