Many women have left the workforce; it’s not clear when they will return
NEW YORK » There was a time when Naomi Peña could seemingly do it all: Work a full-time job and raise four children on her own.
But when the viral pandemic struck early last year, her personal challenges began to mount and she faced an aching decision: Her children or her job?
She chose her children. In August, Peña left her well-paying position as an executive assistant at Google in New York City. In doing so, she joined millions of other women who are sitting out the job market recovery while caring for relatives, searching for affordable child care, reassessing their careers or shifting their work-life priorities.
“I had to pivot,” said Peña, 41, who said the pandemic disrupted her children’s lives and led her to suspend her career because she felt she was needed more at home than at work.
“I walked away from a salary job with amazing benefits, so ultimately I could be present with my kids,” she said.
A single mother of four ranging from middle school-age to college-age, Peña knows she’ll eventually have to look for another full-time job — or join the gig economy — to regain a steady income. Just not yet.
The pandemic has both laid bare the disproportionate burdens many women shoulder in caring for children or aging parents and highlighted the vital roles they have long played in America’s labor force. The United States bled tens of millions of jobs when states began shuttering huge swaths of
the economy after COVID-19 erupted. But as the economy has swiftly rebounded and employers have posted record-high job openings, many women have delayed a return to the workplace, willingly or otherwise.
Even with children back in school, the influx of women into the job market that most analysts had expected has yet to materialize. The number of women either working or looking for work actually fell in September from August. For men, the number rose.
For parents of young children, the male-female disparities are stark. Among mothers of children 13 or younger, the proportion who were employed in September was nearly 4% below pre-pandemic levels, according to Nick Bunker, director of economic research at the Indeed job listings website. For fathers with young children, the decline was just 1%.
“A lot of women have left
the labor force — the question is, how permanent will it be?” said Janet Currie, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University and co-director of the Program on Families and Children at the National Bureau of Economic Research. “And if they’re going to come back, when will we see them come back? I don’t know the answers to any of that.”
Many economists and officials, including Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, had speculated that the re-opening of schools would free more mothers to take jobs. So far that hasn’t happened. The delta variant caused temporary school closings in many areas, which might have discouraged some mothers from returning to work in September. The number of mothers who were employed actually declined for a second straight month.
Still, economists are holding out hope that with increasing vaccinations leading to fewer viral cases, Friday’s U.S. jobs report for October will show an increase in the number of employed women. Any gain, though, is likely to be small, and it could take months to at least partially reverse the pandemic’s impact on female employment.
A major reason, Currie noted, is the worsening difficulty of finding reliable and affordable child care.
That crisis, Currie suggested, is “probably making some people’s minds up for them, because if you can’t get childcare and you have young children, somebody has to look after them.”
Besides childcare, experts point to other factors that have kept some women out of the workforce. The number of people who aren’t working because they’re caring for sick relatives remains elevated. And surveys by the job listings website Indeed have found that many of the unemployed aren’t searching very hard for jobs because their spouses are still working.
As the pandemic erupted in the spring of 2020, roughly 3.5 million mothers with school-age children either lost jobs, took leaves of absence or left the labor market altogether, according to an analysis by the Census Bureau.
A new report, “Women in the Workplace,” by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. illustrates how the pandemic imposed an especially heavy toll on working women. It found that one in three women over the past year had thought about leaving their jobs or “downshifting” their careers. Early in the pandemic, by contrast, the study’s authors said, just one in four women had considered leaving.