Pandemic a historic test for moms
Women have been three times more likely than men to leave the workforce because of disruptions in child care
Cassie Gafford never thought of herself as a stay-at-home mom. She spent years training to become a dentist, then working and teaching in the field.
Then, this summer, she quit.
Gafford, 32, of Philadelphia, worried that going back to work in a pandemic would put her whole family in danger — and putting her 22-month-old daughter in day care didn’t seem safe either, since she’d already survived a frightening case of pneumonia in January.
Staying home solved an immediate problem. The long-term consequences, though, are unclear.
“I don’t know how the trajectory of my career is going to go from here,” she said. “My concern is that
I’ll lose my skills by not working for so long.”
Also weighing on
Gafford is the larger context: Women have been three times more likely than men to leave the workforce due to child care disruptions in the pandemic, the U.S. Census Bureau and Federal Reserve found.
As Gafford noted, the calculations behind such decisions are complex. In her case, the risk of exposure at her job was a deciding factor.
“But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m the woman who’s staying home — and I hate being part of that statistic,” she said.
A month into this unprecedented school year, mothers in wildly different positions all seem to agree on one thing: It’s pushing them to the brink.
“It feels like a puzzle where the pieces just don’t fit together, as many different ways as we try,” said Amy Cohen, 45, a mother of two from West Philadelphia.
It’s become a once-in-ageneration test for women — a measure of how far they’ve come and the durability of that progress. Where gender disparities existed, the situation is exacerbating them.
Northwestern University researchers found that women already were likely to work in sectors where jobs disappeared in the pandemic. Married women — who before the pandemic put in on average twice as much child care time as their husbands — are cutting back hours or quitting jobs, though they’re keenly aware of the cost.
“The effects of this shock are likely to outlast the actual epidemic,” the researchers noted. “Earnings losses from job losses are highly persistent and much more severe when they occur in recessions.”
But women who are quitting work have come to see it as a privilege, recognizing that for many mothers, it’s not even an option.
On text chains, typed one-handed while preparing meals or monitoring schoolwork, women are venting their “mom rage” — a pressure-cooker simmer of anger that was barely contained pre-pandemic and is now stoked well past the boiling point. And they’re quietly swallowing its insidious counterpoint, “mom shame” — both internalized noun and active verb, directed at those making bad choices when there are no good ones.
Stephanie Coontz, a historian of gender and marriage and a research director at the Council on Contemporary Families, said that early in the
pandemic, she saw hopeful signs that “we’re not going back to the ’50s.” Men who had already been contributing to housework and child care stepped up, surveys found.
But with this new school year, she said, it’s become clear that’s not enough.
“This is not a problem that can be solved with the best of goodwill among those most egalitarian parents,” she said. “So you end up making decisions that tend to be based on preexisting inequalities that are embedded in workplace practices and pay scales.”
For many women, it has come down to choices they couldn’t have imagined six months ago.
Jen Devor is a careerdriven woman who quit a steady job to run for city commissioner in 2019, and, after she lost the primary, she spent nine months hunting for just the right position: a well-paying job running a civic-impact program for the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia. But trying to figure out this school year for her
7-year-old daughter Ava? That almost broke her.
“Any time we brought it up over the summer, I would burst into tears,” said Devor, 36. “I couldn’t even handle thinking or talking about it.”
What pained her was the sense that the school district seemed to have no plan.
“I thought the only way I could take some control over the situation was to be home and help navigate it,” she said.
Her husband, Tivoni, switched his schedule so she could have Fridays to launch a new voter-engagement nonprofit, Better Civics. Even so, “the stress just shifts.”
“We’re running out of coping mechanisms,” Devor said. “Our bodies and our brains are only equipped to handle so much, and without an end date I don’t think this is sustainable.”
For other women, it seems there’s no choice except to persist.
Tamika Diggs is a 44year-old mother of three who is on her own. Her sons’ father died in 2016.
Before the pandemic, she was managing — even planning a two-week trip to Japan, her first time on an airplane. Now, she said,
“It’s had me at the breaking point.”
She works nights as a concierge at a luxury apartment building. She finishes her shift at 3 a.m., then Ubers home. When her alarm goes off, after an hour-and-a-half of sleep, it feels like an assault.
Two of her sons are still in school: a 13-year-old aspiring to a magnet high school in a year when placement tests have been canceled, and a 15-year-old with autism who in the past had a one-to-one aide. Now, Diggs fills that role, sitting by his side from 7:45 a.m. to 2:45 p.m. Keeping him on task requires constant attention, she said.
“I could turn away to help my other son for one minute, and I come back and he’s looking up at the ceiling,” Diggs said.
Each weekend, she gets just enough rest to face the week. By Thursday, she’s in despair.
“I broke down and cried
at the table, doing work with the kids,” she said. “I imagine that’s how most parents feel because you’re doing the best you can and it’s just not good enough.”
Part of the problem, said Sabrina Keeler, a mother of two from Ardmore, is that moms are working late hours and making sacrifices to keep up with a school schedule that feels absurd or even counterproductive.
Keeler, who quit her gardening jobs to be a Zoom mom, has been left wondering whether she’s even doing the right thing by keeping her kindergartner in school and on Zoom for 2 hours a day.
“It kind of defeats the purpose because kindergarten is all about socialization and kids learning to sit together and work together and follow along in a class,” she said.
As bleak as it feels, though, there are flickers of hope: For some, more flexible work arrangements are becoming normalized. For others, creative solutions are providing at least temporary relief.