‘SHE-CESSION’ HAS HURT MANY
Child care,
home schooling,
job setbacks
expose fault lines in system
Danielle Vernon-Carleton is a mom of four taking each day as it comes — managing her kids’ virtual school, making meals, getting them their medication and squeezing in some backyard time or even a trip to the zoo. She had to leave her teaching job in August after her school h denied her request for extended unpaid time off. Vernon-Carleton was told she needed to go to work in person, as her children’s own
school went virtual. Her three teenage stepchildren have special needs and require constant attention — like help going to the bathroom and navigating online school. If she were to go to work, the cost of hiring caretakers would have equaled how much she brings home, while at the same time putting her family at risk of the virus, she said.
So, like many other working moms across the country, Vernon-Carleton made a difficult decision she felt was best for her family. She had been teaching for about four years at a private school and has a master’s degree in early childhood education.
“It’s definitely been kind of an eye opener, because you put so much into your work and then have to walk away from it,” said VernonCarleton, 35 of Troy. She’s planning to apply for jobs for the next school year. But her biggest fear is not being able to get hired again.
She’s not alone.
Vernon-Carleton is one of more than 2.3 million women who have left the labor force since last February, compared with 1.8 million men, according to an analysis by the National Women’s Law Center. A year into a pandemic, women are shouldering child care responsibilities while bearing the brunt of workforce setbacks.
The pandemic laid bare deep economic and structural inequities, prompting policy initiatives to address some of the root causes as to why women, especially women of color, were so disproportionately affected by the pandemic’s economic crisis. Experts say strengthening paid time off laws, making child care affordable and increasing wages are vital next steps.
“As we think about rebuilding our economy, going back to what we had before isn’t good enough,” said Maya Raghu, director of workplace equality at the National Women’s Law Center.
Pandemic exposed ‘fault lines’
In Michigan, labor force participation among women fell 5.7%, compared with a drop of 0.1% among men between April and December, according to unpublished data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Nationally, the unemployment rate in February was higher among Black and Asian women and Latinas, according to the National Women’s Law Center.
“It is going to take years to recover from the damage that has already been inflicted,” Raghu said. “And if we don’t act quickly to make some fundamental changes and address these systemic problems, we are going to leave behind women of color in particular, and the families who depend on them, and on their income.”
The main drivers of women leaving the workforce are twofold: Industries where women tend to work, such as leisure and hospitality, were pummeled by pandemic closures, and women are far more likely than men to shoulder
caregiving duties.
The result: a “she-cession,” coined by C. Nicole Mason, president and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.
A recent Census analysis found that mothers are regaining employment and are catching up to fathers, marking what’s called a “Vshaped” employment pattern. Still, this downand-up cycle is a symptom of the larger issue of gender inequality in the workplace and the pandemic has made the pattern “more stark and prolonged, threatening efforts to narrow the gender gap,” Census researchers wrote.
The root causes of the initial disruption to women in the workforce are not new. The pandemic only brought them to light, experts say.
One of those issues is a lack of strong paid and medical leave policies. Unlike other industrialized countries, including Canada and Sweden, American workers do not have guaranteed paid leave. In Michigan, unpaid leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) is out of reach for more than half of working people, according to a January fact sheet from the National Partnership for Women & Families.
That’s the case for someone like VernonCarleton. In August, she had to resign because she wasn’t able to protect her employment through unpaid FMLA. It was either work in person or leave, she said. Vernon-Carleton wanted time off to figure out her new routine.
“My family had no option,” Vernon-Carleton said. “That’s what’s kind of comical about me quitting or whatever, because it’s like I didn’t quit. I had to leave my position.”
She said she hopes the pandemic acts as a learning experience for lawmakers at the state and federal level, so that in the future families don’t go “down a rabbit hole.”
Although women had achieved milestones in the workforce right before the pandemic, that same workforce has not often served them well, said Jocelyn Frye, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Some longstanding disparities include the gender wage gap and women, particularly women of color, working in low paying jobs.
“If nothing else, we should have learned
from the past year where the fault lines are,” Frye said.
Employers, government can bolster economic recovery
So, where do we go from here? Raghu says employers and policy makers should take steps to spur economic recovery and put in place protections, or risk erasing “a generation of gains made by women in the workplace.”
Part of that means rethinking work, because “workplaces are not set up to handle people who are both breadwinners and caregivers,” she said.
Employers can reset norms around workplace flexibility, such as encouraging flexible work options, establishing set hours for meetings to draw a line between work and home, and putting in place policies for responding to emails outside of typical business hours, a September 2020 report from McKinsey & Company recommends. The report also says employers should adjust their policies to better support employees, such as offering more paid time off and resources for home schooling.
Experts say government must step in with policies that strengthen paid time off provisions to support working parents, especially mothers.
“We clearly need to invest in strong policies that really support people who have caregiving responsibilities, that should be lesson No. 1 from the pandemic,” Frye said.
Under Michigan paid sick leave law, workers can accrue 1 hour for every 35 hours worked and the rule applies to employers with 50 or more employees. Advocacy groups like Mothering Justice are pushing for expansions like requiring businesses with fewer than 10 employees to offer paid leave and requiring businesses to provide workers 1 hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours worked. That was a provision in a proposed citizens’ initiative that was headed for the 2018 ballot. GOP lawmakers stopped the initiative from being put on the ballot and instead passed a bill that made the law applicable for fewer employers and pared
back hours accrued.
President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus bill extends tax credits for employers that provide employees with paid sick and family leave. But that leaves it up to employers, Raghu said. It’s not a mandate or requirement.
“If you’re a worker whose employer happens to not want to provide paid sick leave, then what are you supposed to do? You have to choose between your job and your health or the health of your family,” she said.
Still, two expanded tax credits — the Child Care Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit — in recent COVID-19 relief legislation could help lift millions of people, including those with children, out of poverty. The plan makes $3,000 in child credits, or $3,600 for those under 6, available for families, cutting child poverty by 40%, according to a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report. The expansion of the other tax credit would cover people without children, including those in low wage and essential jobs like many women.
Moving forward, parents should also have more affordable child care options, said Oriana Powell, a child care organizer with Mothering Justice.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s 2022 proposed budget includes millions of dollars for child care to increase the income eligibility threshold for child care assistance from 150% to 200% of the federal poverty guidelines through September 2022 and then 160% after that, and a 10% increase in subsidies for child care providers.
Powell says while these provisions are welcome, more is needed. For instance, the 10% increase isn’t enough to financially support child care providers and expanding income eligibility doesn’t necessarily address the need for more child care centers.
Katharyn Geiger, an elementary school teacher and Livonia mom of three, said although she doesn’t need child care help now, she will if she has to go back to work in person. She anticipates having trouble finding adequate and affordable options.
Geiger, 36, said she has thought of quitting multiple times and home-schooling her kids, but realized that they need socialization and she needs a breather. It’s exhausting being a working mom and feels like “coordinating a military effort,” she said.
One year of a pandemic has amplified the need to acknowledge the child care responsibilities parents shoulder as work on top of careers, Powell said.
“We have to get to a point where we’re actually representing and supporting those having children,” she said. “… to experience motherhood right now, it’s an extremely physical feat, to experience motherhood in this moment or parenting as a whole.”