Commentary
It seemed incredibly obvious to me over the past five years that women of child-bearing age, particularly married ones, would leave the professional workforce in droves. That said, I could never somehow access the data in real time, and hardly anyone was reporting it.
I saw it happening anecdotally but never had enough aggregate evidence to write an article about it. I knew the time would come and that I would have much to say.
Think back to what happened. The schools closed. Those were effectively child care institutions for many people. They were also a substitute for youth jobs. Everything about family life turned on their functioning. That goes for having moms in the professional workforce. All family life today is a delicate balancing act, even in the best of times. Break one thing, and the entire balance would fall apart.
The school closures did that. To compensate for that—an action never justified based on real data but rather merely flowed from models on disease spread generally—the workforce was sent home too. Not the whole workforce, just the “nonessential” people. The “essentials” were divided between the working class, which had to actually do stuff, and the professional class, which could pretend to work at home.
A vast number of moms in the professional workforce were deemed essential, but they worked at home, which allowed them to also care for the kids who were not at school. It was stressful, to say the least, and cocktail hour was a relief.
Meanwhile, they discovered what their kids were studying at school. The consequence was vast outrage and a new sense among professional-class moms that they needed to be more involved in their kids’ education.
Meanwhile, child care facilities were closed, the same as so many other institutions. So working-class moms had no option but to stay home with the kids, too. There they discovered a new bonding experience and recalibrated the finances of the family, newly realizing that their jobs were not actually helping household income that much once you figure in child care.
Plus, there was a new realization that moms with young children in all classes had a job to do in raising kids. Institutions were not doing it.
Five years later, we are finally getting the data. It shows exactly what I had expected. Moms are leaving the workforce in droves. More accurately stated, they never really came back.
Jessica Grose reported: “Since January 2024, women’s employment rates are down about 2 percent from where men’s are, [while] 212,000 women left the work force between January and August of this year, while 44,000 men entered.
“The share of mothers of young children in the labor market fell almost 3 percentage points in the first half of the year. Unemployment for black women has risen disproportionately over the past two years.”
