Lack of child care forced 1.3 million US women out of work since February 2020
Child care cost has doubled in two decades while wages are stagnant
Working
mothers are giving up their careers and personal ambitions to help the
families. The situation was not ideal for working mothers before the COVID-19
hit them hard. The expensive child care was a huge problem for many American
working class families before the spread of coronavirus. The COVID-19 spread in
US has severely affected the businesses and livelihoods. The unemployment rate
has already reached 10%. Millions of
jobs have been lost so far.
The lack of
child care has forced 1.3 million working mothers to give up jobs to look after
the families. Online education is the other reason forcing mothers out of work
and helping their children in online lessons.
The research
is increasingly pointing to a retreat of working mothers from the US labor
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.
Child care
is necessary for parents. Particularly working mothers, to work and earn an
income, yet it has become an increasingly crushing expense for families with
young children. Over the past two decades, the cost of child care has more than
doubled, while wages have remained mostly stagnant. Many parents find
that child care expenses consume most of their paycheck, and some decide to
leave the workforce as a result. Typically, mothers are the ones who make
that tradeoff.
Research
supports that high child care costs and limited financial assistance are
driving mothers out of the workforce. Over the past two decades, women’s labor
force participation in the United States has stalled while other major
developed nations have seen continued growth.
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
percent of women in that age group were working or looking for work in
February, compared to 74.9 percent 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 percent of US families, up from 11 percent in
1960, according to federal labour figures. Women also comprise nearly half the
US labour force, making their inability to work a significant drag on the
economy and hindering any recovery from the pandemic’s impact.
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.
“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?”
More mothers
than fathers have left 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 percent among mothers with children younger than 6, and
4.3 percent for those with children 6 to 12. Fathers of children under the age
of 12 also left the workforce, but at lower rates, said Landivar, who
co-authored the report.
The working
mothers make up a majority of the country’s teachers, nurses, child care
workers, social workers, librarians, bookkeepers, waitresses, cashiers and
housekeepers, according to federal labour figures.
Mothers in
particular are the majority of the country’s teachers, nurses and child care
workers. Despite the progress over the past two years, 80 percent of US private
sector workers have no access to paid family leave, which is not mandated by
federal law.
Rukhsana Manzoor Deputy Editor
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