More women are having to pick: job or kids?
After 15 years in a high-paying finance job, Joanna Lepore knew she’d have to quit, for a once-unthinkable reason: She has children.
“I never had any intention of leaving my job,” said the married mother of two kids under 10 years old living in Haddonfield, Pa. But working remotely — while home-schooling her son and watching her toddler daughter shut out of day care — burned her out.
With child care and schools closed, the veteran of the Wall Street investment firm PIMCO left her job onboarding clients in August, just before the remote school year resumed. Her husband is employed in food distribution and works outside the home.
Lepore, 38, has lots of company. Women have borne a greater share of job losses during the pandemic. One in three working mothers is considering leaving the workforce or downshifting careers, which could stunt their incomes for decades, surveys show. Women already shoulder more responsibility for the domestic and emotional work in a family — disparities heightened by COVID-19 — and typically make less than men — 82 cents on the dollar.
Now entering Year Two of the coronavirus, women increasingly are forced to choose: career or family?
Study after study, including a recent Mckinsey 2020 report, shows that women reduced work hours or left jobs altogether to care for children, said co-author Jessica Huang, a partner in Mckinsey’s Silicon Valley office. “The higher load of household work and child care means women are feeling burnt out more than male counterparts.”
Job losses among men (5.1 percent) and women (5.9 percent) between January 2020 and January 2021 show women pay the price. For women of color, unemployment is higher. More than 1 in 12 Black women (8.5 percent) were unemployed in January 2021.
“Women of color bear the brunt,” said Tina Tchen, CEO of nonprofit Times Up Now, which fights gender discrimination in the workplace. “The pandemic exposed long-standing lack of caregiver infrastructure for all women.”
Dropping out
A perfect storm of child care gaps and school blackouts is crippling the careers of women, especially those caring for younger kids.
By any measure, child care centers across the U.S. have struggled. Enrollment last spring cratered and never fully rebounded. Fresh expenses, from protective gear to deep cleaning, put them deeper in the hole, forcing up to 40 percent of U.S. day cares to shutter. Those that remain enrolled fewer children.
The pandemic also forced most schools to close over the last year. Disruption was nearly universal.
The combination walloped working women, creating a “pink-collar recession,” said Diane Cornwall-levy, executive director of Women’s Way in Philadelphia.
By February, more than 2.3 million U.S. women had dropped out completely from the labor force since the start of the pandemic. That dragged down women’s labor force participation rate — the percent of adult women working or looking for work — to 57 percent. Prepandemic, women’s labor participation rate had not been this low since 1988.
By comparison, 1.8 million men have left the labor force since February 2020.
Nationally, nearly 1 in 11 Latinas (8.5 percent), and more than 1 in 13 Asian women (7.9 percent) remained unemployed, according to the National Women’s Law Center. For white women, the rate was 5.2 percent.
It’s largely women working America’s low-paying jobs.
“A lot of these industries are heavily female, particularly food and beverage and hospitality. Those were hit first and hardest. Women are naturally adversely impacted,” said Doneene Damon, managing partner of the Richards, Layton & Finger law firm in Wilmington, Del.
“It’s been the perfect storm,” Damon said. “We’re now in year two. Everyone’s exhausted. Women are completely overwhelmed with child care and household care, plus their jobs.”
Sacrificing
Without school, day care or outside help, women are more likely than male colleagues to leave jobs or work less. This hurts earnings for years, from middle-class women to high earners.
“I reached a breaking point,” Lepore said. “I loved my job and people I worked with, aside from a boss who demanded a ton of face time, and, strangely enough, was a woman. There was no way I’d make it through with my sanity intact. I either sacrifice my family or my career.”
She recently started remote work at financial services company IHS Markit with a more understanding boss.
The U.S. is now at risk of losing $64.5 billion in economic activity in a year from women’s lost wages — largely because of the lack of child care.
Reopening schools
Alison Perelman calls the “emotional labor” of working from home the toughest double duty — attending to a child educated on Zoom, motivating family to stick to a routine, undertaking household chores and cooking endless meals.
“This falls predominantly on women,” Perelman said. “As we’ve all made peace with the one-year anniversary, it’s now a hinge point where women are opting out. And once we all start to return to the workplace, it’s not clear to me that because women were first out, will we be first back in?”
As executive director of political advocacy group Philadelphia 3.0, she’s incredulous that the Philadelphia School District has announced only vague plans to reopen in September.
“For women, there’s no going back to work without school,” said Perelman, who has a 6year-old.
Accommodating solutions
If working moms and dads need a national child care policy, what would that look like? Tchen of Times Up Now says a broad definition includes day care, paid family leave and inhome elder care.
“Two million babies are born every year, and the same number of Americans turn 65 every year. On both ends, this caregiving is a growth industry,” Tchen said.
Some private companies have started paving the way.
Outside the U.S., companies in Europe and South America are structuring shorter workdays and job sharing. Some families have tried moving to child care-friendly cities or more accommodating countries such as France.
However, the U.S. lacks national standards on paid family or sick leave, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
“The current system is a patchwork of policies determined by employers, state and local laws or negotiated through labor contracts,” the foundation said in a December 2020 report.
President Joe Biden’s newly passed stimulus package, the American Rescue Plan, specifically supports families with young children and child care providers.
It includes $14 billion in emergency block grants, mainly for child care for front-line and emergency workers, $24 billion to help struggling providers meet payroll and rent, and $1 billion for Head Start programs.
Tchen called the package “great news, as it is really needed as emergency relief. But it isn’t the full investment that is needed to build the caregiving infrastructure — including child care — that our country needs.”