Women exit workforce over child care
More women forced to choose family over job
Women in the workforce are another casualty of the coronavirus pandemic.
Forced to choose between employment and providing care for their children, most of whom are spending at least part of the week in remote learning, more women dropped out of the workforce in September than at any time since the height of the pandemic in April.
Leslie Chiaramonte gave up her position as a nurse case manager at White Plains Hospital in New York when the cost of a full-time babysitter exceeded her own salary. Nicole Johnson had to turn down the offer to return to her teacher’s aide job full time because her 6-year-old was participating in remote learning.
For Stacy Brodsky, a mother of two who had taught pre-K in White Plains, New York, for six years, there was never any question that she, and not her husband, would stay home and care for her kids, also learning remotely.
“I worked in preschool,” she said. “I did not have insurance and I did not make that much money.”
In September, four times as many women as men dropped out of the labor force, meaning they are no longer working or looking for work, according to a
National Women’s Law Center analysis of data released this month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Of the nearly 1.1 million workers ages 20 and older who dropped out of the workforce, 865,000 were women, including 324,000 Latinas and 58,000 Black women, compared with 216,000 men.
Women in all income brackets, from minimum wage to six-figure incomes, were affected. But low-wage workers tend to have the least amount of flexibility in their jobs. Higher-wage workers are six times as likely to be able to work from home as lower-wage workers, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Working mothers have long faced “the second shift” – coming home to unpaid work that includes household labor and child care – and the pandemic has heightened the caregiver burden with children staying home instead of
returning to school. Economists believe this could have long-term effects on the gender wage gap and a woman’s career trajectory.
The situation is made more severe because many women – especially those of color – were laid off in industries hard hit by the pandemic including retail, child care and restaurants, said Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, a professor in the Labor Studies & Employment Relations department at Rutgers University.
“Some of it may be people dropping out because they are caring for young children or caring for elders or people with disabilities, and that has become their new full time, unpaid job in effect,” Rodgers said.
When schools abruptly closed in March, Chiaramonte did her best to hold on to her job by paying a babysitter until June, thinking it would be a temporary situation. The family depended on her job for health insurance. Her husband is self-employed and runs a funeral home.
In August, Chiaramonte, a mother of two girls who worked as a nurse case manager on a floor with COVID-19 patients at White Plains Hospital during the pandemic, learned that her older daughter’s classes would be going hybrid.
That meant she would be in school just two days a week.
After using up a week of vacation time to find a babysitter, the mother realized it would not be economically viable to continue working.
“A babysitter was somewhere in the ballpark of $3,800 to $4,000 per month,” she said of care for her two daughters, ages 3 and 6. “I can’t afford that. That’s my salary.”
She had hoped her work could be done remotely and asked her employer if she could come in 10 hours a week while her child was in school and work from home the rest of the time.
“The hospital refused to bend,” she said. “They told me I could work per diem, which would have meant losing my benefits. They expected me to go back to work with no health insurance on a COVID floor.”
Without reasonable options, Chiaramonte quit her job.
Simple economics play a role when it comes to dual earning households, Rodgers said.
“When both parents are working and somebody has to stay at home, it’s the person with the lower income who stays at home,” she said. “And usually that’s the women because on average, women earn less than men.”
C. Nicole Mason, president and chief executive officer of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Women’s Policy Research, said industry sectors that employ a large number of women have been the hardest hit.
“The service sector, education, health care, leisure and hospitality are all sectors that are dominated by women,” Mason said. “Many of the jobs that were lost have not come back.
“So when women go to find work, their old jobs are no longer available and finding a new job is harder than ever because there are so many women who are unemployed.”
Nicole Johnson in June lost her job as a teacher’s assistant at a state licensed preschool program for children with special needs.
“Going on unemployment sent me in a panic,” said Johnson, a White Plains, New York, resident who is divorced and cares for her 6-year-old daughter. “I’ve never been without a job. So I didn’t know how I was going to manage.”
In August, Johnson found out that the preschool where she worked was planning to open five days a week for inperson classes.
At the same time, she discovered her daughter’s district was adopting a hybrid learning model.
Johnson reapplied for her job and asked if she could do remote teaching, but her preschool could not accommodate that.
“How does that work for us parents? Our kids are going to have remote learning. We can’t leave young children alone. If I put my child at YMCA, it would have cost me $1,900 a month,” she said.
“I could not afford that. So I had no choice. I decided to stay home with my daughter and support her through her learning.”
Despite her circumstance, Johnson said she feels “blessed.” She was able to get a rent adjustment and food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
“I’m blessed to receive unemployment to cover my other bills,” she said. “I have been working for 15 years. I’ve paid my taxes. I’ve done everything responsibly. So right now, I’m choosing my child and my safety, and I qualify for this. It’s not permanent. It’s going to be temporary. And it’s going to be a stepping-stone.”
Stacy Brodsky had been teaching pre-K when her school went to remote learning in March. Each member of her family was logging into a different school district: Her husband is a fifthgrade teacher; her 12-year-old daughter attends White Plains schools; and her 9year-old daughter, who has learning disabilities, attends private school.
Brodsky said she managed to hold on to her job until the end of the school year, even though it was chaotic to keep her younger daughter focused and engaged.
But as the prospect of another school year loomed, she started getting nervous: Her husband would be teaching in person five days a week, but her older daughter would be remote four days a week.
“She’s a 12-year-old girl. There’s no way I could leave her alone at home,” Brodsky said, adding, “we are in four different districts and I was also worried about getting sick. Someone in the family needs to be healthy,” she said of her decision to quit her job.
Still, the choice has been tough. “I feel like I lost a big part of my identity. I feel depressed about it,” she said. “I miss my classroom. I miss the kids in my classroom. I miss that stimulation. I miss my colleagues.”
New York resident Shelly Guzman has a 6-year-old daughter who is severely autistic and nonverbal and attends school in Rockland County. Her daughter’s school started with the hybrid model for September and October. In November, their plan is to go back full time.
Guzman, who worked two jobs as a dental assistant until March, hasn’t been able to go back to work.
“I really can’t commit to anything permanent right now because I don’t know what’s going to happen. Until this whole thing gets better and things can go back to where she has a constant routine, it is hard,” she said. “Since the reopening plan, they closed the school twice already. Once because a staff member was experiencing symptoms. Then last week, they closed two days because the mailman had symptoms.”
Guzman said she would try to go back to work one day a week soon.
“I miss the interaction. This is so isolating,” she said. “I miss talking to people and dealing with people and just that whole, rewarding experience of just going to work.”
Chiaramonte, the nurse, said her days are filled with helping her child learn via online schooling and helping out with her husband’s funeral home business.
One of her biggest concerns, for now, is health insurance.
“We spent over $10,000 in PPE, alone,” she said. We had to because he needed to be safe.” (The family lives on the top floor of the funeral home).
“We had to buy all different levels of disinfectant,” she said. “This is our business. This is where we live. This is how we feed our kids. So we had to keep him working in the business.”
Chiaramonte said the family has been putting off buying health insurance for themselves because of the high cost.
“We are taking a tremendous risk,” she said. “But we just might have to figure out a way to pay for marketplace health insurance.”
She said she was frustrated with her employer for not accommodating her request to work remotely.
“I said I would do anything just to keep my job because I love working there. I love the hospital,” she said. “I love the people. I’m sad and heartbroken that I had to walk away from a position just because they weren’t willing to work with us.”
Dawn French, senior vice president for community relations and marketing at White Plains Hospital, said the hospital was doing the best it could.
“We understand these are extraordinary times filled with new challenges, and we have been working with our staff to offer flexible schedules, including the option of transitioning to part time or per diem shifts and weekend shifts, if available,” French said. “The health care industry almost wholly requires staff to work on-site because it is our job to care for patients. This includes the role of care manager, which is performed by nurses or social workers and requires them to interact with patients and their clinical team directly, to safely transition patient care to home or another facility.”
Rodgers said both employers and government have a role to play to help the situation.
“There’s a lot that companies can do in terms of recognizing that their male and female employees now have substantial overlap between their paid work and their unpaid care responsibilities,” she said. Chiaramonte couldn’t agree more. “There’s no give and take,” she said. “I felt like of all things, I’ve been an essential worker and a frontline worker. I showed up every single day despite the unknowns and it would have been nice to have the support from either the government level or the hospital level to make sure that I could still continue to work while caring for my child. This is not a choice. I didn’t have a choice in this at all.”