As jobs return, some women choosing not to return to work
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 from the job market while caring for relatives, searching for affordable child care, reassessing their careers or shifting their worklife 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.”
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, many women have delayed a return to the workplace, willingly or otherwise.
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 percent 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 percent.
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.
A major reason is the worsening difficulty of finding reliable and affordable child care, 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.
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.”
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. 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.
Months before the pandemic, Keryn Francisco, a 51-year-old former designer for The North Face, had to decide whether to move, along with her company, to Denver.
She ultimately decided not to leave. And as COVID-19 raged, she became more comfortable with her decision, even if it meant being unemployed and shrinking her severance payout. She had been collecting unemployment aid and has picked up some freelancing to avoid dipping too deeply into savings.
A solo parent, Francisco wanted to focus on caring for her son, now 10, and her elderly parents in the San Francisco Bay area.
“It was out of a sense of responsibility and obligation,” she said. “But also, honestly, I didn’t know what was happening with COVID. So there was a lot of fear and kind of insecurity about like, if my parents died.”