Women are Still Being Forced to Choose Between Childcare and Career

Women remain among those who have been hit the hardest after the pandemic. Working mothers have been pushed into navigating childcare, home school, and domestic responsibilities on top of maintaining their careers. This has caused women to leave the workforce in droves since early 2020, with many struggling to reenter the workforce. Nearly two and a half years into the pandemic, women continue to be faced with the “pick and choose” battle between their home life and career. Let’s take an in-depth look at how the pandemic has impacted working women.??

Between February and April 2020, women lost 12.2 million jobs, reversing an entire decade of job gains since the end of the Great Recession – with some calling it the first female recession in history. However, from February 2020 to January 2022, male workers regained all jobs they had lost due to the public health crisis, while an additional 1.1 million women left the labor force during that span. Why are over a million women not returning to work despite an economic recovery boosted by falling rates of the coronavirus infection? The large disparity between the number of men and women joining the labor force likely reflects the uneven caregiving responsibilities women have taken on earlier in the pandemic and more recently with unexpected variants, which caused continued school and childcare disruptions just earlier this year.?

?In a way, the ongoing pandemic has exacerbated workplace pain points that were already problematic before 2020. Lack of childcare support, indifference to women caring for elderly parents, and pay inequities have caused many women to reflect on societal expectations and how they feel about their particular workplace. Women who formerly occupied executive roles reported feelings of discontent and even failure from not experiencing a sense of success in either their work life or their home life. Trying to maintain a work-life balance in the midst of a pandemic has led to high levels of exhaustion and a decline in mental health.

?For women who do have hopes of climbing back out of this recession, a persistent question remains: What happens to the future of childcare? With no obvious answer, women have felt obligated to maintain their status of fulfilling obligations at home, which some have called the COVID motherhood penalty. Because even as we see signs of recovery from the public health crisis, mothers may continue to lack career opportunities for what could be months to come.? While women gained 188,000 jobs in January 2022, they are still short by more than 1.8 million jobs lost since the onset of COVID-19. This would take women nearly 10 months of growth at January's level to regain the jobs they lost.

?Though it may take years to see the full ramifications of COVID-19 on working women, as early as this month, new research shows how the loss of women in the workforce due to the pandemic will have a negative effect on the wage gap. A resume gap of three months or less resulted in women earning $0.83 when hired for every $1 earned by a man with a similar length of unemployment. But when men and women were out of the workforce for three to 24 months before landing a job, the wage gap widened, with women earning between $0.77 and $0.79 for each $1 that a man made. Most of these women had resume gaps for family reasons with 85% reporting that they were unemployed because they were caring for a child.?

?With the number of cases steadily decreasing as the number of vaccinations continue increasing, there may be light at the end of the tunnel for women hoping to reenter the workforce. With schools staying open longer, and children being required to quarantine at home less often, this will reduce some of the weight on women’s shoulders as they look to their future. As is usually the case, this progress for women will be slow, with the road to “normalcy” continuing to hit roadblocks even as the pandemic improves.

?At?Reserve Squad, we keep women engaged with their career, even when they decide (or have no option but to) take a step back. We strive to eliminate the disparities between men and women rejoining the workforce by helping companies manage an internal pool of freelance female talent. This provides working moms with the comfort to return to a traditional work model when they are ready.