Pandemic didn’t stop moms
Data analyses show mothers continued working even as COVID-19 took hold in US
For mothers during the pandemic, the usual push and pull of work and family life has felt more like a tug of war. Yet despite concerns that they would quit their jobs en masse, most succeeded in keeping them, two new data analyses show.
In fact, one group of mothers — college graduates with babies and toddlers — became significantly more likely to work for pay than they were before the pandemic.
As of March, slightly more mothers of school-age children were working than were in the March before the pandemic.
It is a testament to American women’s attachment to the labor market, researchers said — they have hard-earned careers, built over time and central to their identities, and are increasingly primary breadwinners for their families. It also speaks to the value of flexibility over when and where people work.
“The real story of women during the pandemic is that they remained in the labor force,” Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist and leading scholar of women and work, wrote in one of the new analyses. “They stayed on their jobs, as much as they could, and persevered.”
Still, they were stretched thin — and many still are. Child care, after-school care and summer camps are not back at capacity; people are still getting COVID-19; and for some mothers, the reopening of schools gave them a chance to pause and realize how overwhelmed they were.
“I’m looking around and being like, why do I feel so stressed out this year while my kids are in school?” said Rebecca Bird Grigsby, a training coordinator at a gaming company, a working artist and a mother of two. “There’s the expectation that things should just go back to normal, that I can work at full capacity, I can focus on professional development, the kids will be fine. And that’s not necessarily true.”
The share of mothers living with children ages 5-17 who are actively working was 1.7% higher in March than in March 2019, found the second analysis, by Misty Heggeness, a principal economist at the U.S. Census Bureau. The exception is mothers living with children under 5. The share at work is down 4.2%, most likely because of acute child care shortages this year. Centers have been unable to hire enough teachers, and because children under 5 cannot yet be vaccinated, there are many more interruptions for illness and quarantines. This has made it particularly difficult for mothers without college degrees to work.
“There are nearly 1.2 million extremely qualified women who haven’t returned to the workforce,” President Joe Biden said at a union event last month. “There’s a simple reason: There’s no affordable child care for them.”
Samantha Rogers is a single mother of three boys under 6 in Cookeville, Tennessee. She works part-time cleaning hotel rooms for $7.25 an hour, but that’s not enough to rent an apartment. They bounce around and have spent a few nights outside. Yet she cannot get a full-time job — like the one she had before the pandemic, earning $15 hourly at a factory — without child care.
Nearby child care centers have long waitlists and tuition she could not afford — $2,000 a month for her three children. Instead, her older children attend a free Head Start preschool, but it ends at 3 p.m., so she cannot work full days. Her sister watches her baby while she works, but Rogers cannot work when her sister is unavailable — and her boss said she would lose her job if she missed more than five days a year.
“It makes it so much harder when you really just want a stable place for your kids, but you can’t afford it because you don’t have anywhere for your kids to go so that you can afford it,” she said.