Child care crisis pushes US mothers out of the labour force

Angela Wynn had just launched her own project management business, hitting a career stride after years of struggle that began with earning an undergraduate degree as a single mother.

Then the coronavirus pandemic hit, forcing many schools to shift online. The now-married mother of five saw little choice but to give up her newly minted business to help three of her children cope with remote learning while her husband, the primary breadwinner, kept his job at a senior living center.

“To see all that come to fruition, I did it, but now it's gone,” said Wynn, who has always been the main caretaker for her children, ages 1, 5, 11, 12 and 18. “But my priority is my kids and their education is everything.”

Wynn's story is becoming distressingly common. Research is increasingly pointing to a retreat of working mothers from the US labour force as the pandemic leaves parents with few child care options and the added burden of navigating distance learning.

The trend threatens the financial stability of families in the near-term. In the long-term, the crisis could stall — if not reverse — decades of hard-fought gains by working women who are still far from achieving labour force parity with men.

Thousands of school districts are starting the school year with remote instruction, including most of the largest ones. At least half the country's child care providers are closed and may not survive the crisis without financial help to cope with implementing safety standards and reduced enrollment. Negotiations for a bailout of the industry have stalled in Congress.

In August, the federal jobs reports showed that women in their prime-earning years — 25 to 54 — were dropping out of the work force more than other age groups.

About 77 per cent of women in that age group were working or looking for work in February, compared to 74.9 per cent in August. The decline is most pronounced among Black women of that age range, whose participation rate is down 5 percentage points since February, compared to 4 percentage points for Hispanic women and 2 percentage points for white women.

Overall, the drop translates into 1.3 million women exiting the labour force since February.

“We think this reflects the growing child care crisis,” BNP Paribas economists Daniel Ahn and Steven Weinberg wrote in recent report. “It is hard to see this abating soon, and if anything could become worse as we move into fall.”

Few families can afford for mothers not to work indefinitely: Mothers are now are the equal, primary, or sole earners in 40 per cent of U.S. families, up from 11 per cent in 1960, according to federal labor figures. Women also comprise nearly half the U.S. labour force, making their inability to work a significant drag on the economy and hindering any recovery from the pandemic's impact.

In Wynn's case, she is working a part-time job to help pay the bills. Even so, the family is taking a financial hit, refinancing their home outside Nashville and starting a garden in their backyard to cut down on grocery bills.

Despite the leaps over the past decades, working women still entered the pandemic at a disadvantage. They are typically paid 82 cents for every dollar men earn, according to research by the National Women's Law Center.

Among working mothers and fathers, the wage gap is even higher at 70 cents. The median household earnings for mothers in the U.S. is USD 42,000, compared to USD 60,000 for fathers. When left with no choice but to give up one income as child care options collapse, that wage gap incentivizes fathers to stay in the workforce and mothers to leave, or at least scale back.

“There is already a motherhood wage gap. In times of uncertainty and recession, you protect the primary earner," said Liana Christin Landivar, a sociologist at the Maryland Population Research Center and author of the book, “Mothers at Work: Who Opts Out?” That is bearing out in the numbers. More mothers than fathers have exited the labour force since the pandemic began, according to research published in August by Sage Journals, which analysed data from the Current Population Survey.

Between February and April, labor force participation fell 3.2 per cent among mothers with children younger than 6, and 4.3 per cent for those with children 6 to 12. Fathers of children under 12 also left the workforce, but at lower rates, said Landivar, who co-authored the report.

In a separate study, the same researchers found mothers are cutting back on working hours more than fathers. Mothers of children under 12 were working more than six fewer hours a week than fathers in April, compared to less than five fewer hours in February, according to the study, which looked at sub-sample of heterosexual married men and women from the CPS, a monthly survey of 60,000 households sponsored by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“We already knew there was a large gender inequality in the labour force, and the pandemic just makes this worse,” Landivar said.