The pandemic has been punishing for working mothers. But mostly, they’ve kept working

For mothers during the pandemic, the usual push and pull of work and family life has felt more like a tug of war. Yet despite concerns that they would quit their jobs en masse, most succeeded in keeping them, two new data analyses show.

In fact, one group of mothers — college graduates withbabies and toddlers — became significantly more likely to work for pay than theywere before the pandemic.

As of March, slightly more mothers of school-aged childrenwere working than were in the March before the pandemic.

It is a testament to American women’s attachment to thelabour market, researchers said — they have hard-earned careers, built overtime and central to their identities, and are increasingly primary breadwinnersfor their families. It also speaks to the value of flexibility over when andwhere people work.

“The real story of women during the pandemic is that theyremained in the labour force,” Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist and leadingscholar of women and work, wrote in one of the new analyses. “They stayed ontheir jobs, as much as they could, and persevered.”

Still, they were stretched thin — and many still are. Childcare, after-school care and summer camps are not back at capacity; people arestill getting COVID-19; and for some mothers, the reopening of schools gavethem a chance to pause and realise how overwhelmed they were.

“I’m looking around and being like, why do I feel sostressed out this year while my kids are in school?” said Rebecca Bird Grigsby,a training coordinator at a gaming company, a working artist and a mother oftwo. “There’s the expectation that things should just go back to normal, that Ican work at full capacity, I can focus on professional development, the kidswill be fine. And that’s not necessarily true.”

The share of mothers living with children ages 5-17 who areactively working was 1.7% higher in March than in March 2019, found the secondanalysis, by Misty L. Heggeness, a principal economist at the Census Bureau.The exception is mothers living with children under 5. The share at work isdown 4.2%, most likely because of acute child care shortages this year. Centreshave been unable to hire enough teachers, and because children under 5 cannotyet be vaccinated, there are many more interruptions for illness andquarantines. This has made it particularly difficult for mothers withoutcollege degrees to work.

“There are nearly 1.2 million extremely qualified women whohaven’t returned to the workforce,” President Joe Biden said at a union eventlast month. “There’s a simple reason: There’s no affordable child care forthem.”

Samantha Rogers is a single mother of three boys under 6 inCookeville, Tennessee. She works part-time cleaning hotel rooms for $7.25 anhour, but that’s not enough to rent an apartment. They bounce around and havespent a few nights outside. Yet she cannot get a full-time job — like the oneshe had before the pandemic, earning $15 hourly at a factory — without childcare.

Nearby child care centres have long waitlists and tuitionshe could not afford — $2,000 a month for her three children. Instead, herolder children attend a free Head Start preschool, but it ends at 3 pm, so shecannot work full days. Her sister watches her baby while she works, but Rogerscannot work when her sister is unavailable — and her boss said she would loseher job if she missed more than five days a year.

“It makes it so much harder when you really just want astable place for your kids, but you can’t afford it because you don’t haveanywhere for your kids to go so that you can afford it,” she said.

Justise McGowan, 13, rests her head on her mother, Dr Sandra McGowan-Watts, at home in Matteson, Illinois, US, Mar 16, 2022. McGowan-Watts, whose husband Steven Watts died in May 2020, has been trying to maintain as much of Justise's routine as possible. Last summer, when the bushes in her yard needed to be trimmed, Justise found her dad's hedge trimmers and got to work. "She does the things that he would do," Sandra says.

Working mothers’ resiliency does not mean the pandemic andrecession were not extraordinarily difficult for them. In April 2020 — with theeconomy and schools shut down — the share of mothers actively working withschool-aged children at home dropped 22% from the year before. The time parentsspent on child care doubled, and women shouldered most of it. They alsodisproportionately held the jobs that were lost during lockdowns, like childand elder care or waitressing.

Black women without college degrees were hit hardest. Theywere overrepresented in service and caregiving jobs, and also more likely toget COVID-19 or care for someone who did.

But overall, the notion of a so-called she-cession — thatwomen lost jobs at a higher rate than men — was not borne out. Gender was notthe main differentiator in who lost work, Goldin found. Education was. Forwomen as well as men, those without college degrees left work at twice the rateof college graduates. A major reason was that jobs requiring college degreeswere much more likely to be able to be done from home.

Take mothers ages 25-34, who were likely to have youngchildren in need of a high level of care. Comparing the hardest-hit months ofApril and May 2020 with the same months in 2018, the share of college graduatesin this group who were employed declined 1.3 percentage points, from 84% to82.7%. But the share of employed mothers without college degrees dropped 4.4points, from 65.9% to 61.5%, Goldin’s analysis found.

Remarkably, by last year, the employment of college graduatemothers of all ages with infants and toddlers increased from 2018 levels,particularly in the spring and summer of 2021, she found. That is probablybecause they and their spouses were able to work from home, which gave themmore flexibility on things like breastfeeding and child care schedules that donot match up with office hours. Also, fathers’ time spent caring for babies increased25%.

“Perhaps new mothers who would have left the labour forcedecided to remain in,” Goldin wrote.

One reason people overestimated how much women’s employmentplummeted in the pandemic was because there had been a run-up in the share ofwomen working immediately prior, a period of very low unemployment. Comparisonsto those months made the drop-off look larger and obscured the longer-termtrend: The labour force participation rate for women 25-54 in the United Statesstalled in the early 1990s at about 75%, and has not changed much since.

Over the course of the pandemic, mothers’ work patterns havevaried with the circumstances, including COVID-19 waves.

Early on, those who worked in person at lower-paying jobs,like store clerks or health aides, were more likely to stop, because they couldnot afford child care or were laid off.

Though white-collar workers were less likely to leave workoverall, those who left did it later in the pandemic, probably because theywere worn down by “intense and frequent interruptions from family members,”Heggeness wrote in another paper with Palak Suri of the University of Maryland.

The age of the children also made a difference. Early on,schools closed but many child care centres, run privately, quickly reopened, soparents of older children were most affected. This year, though, schools areopen but child care capacity is down.

When schools reopened, fathers began doing less at home,Goldin’s data shows. Many mothers fear that their careers have stalled and thatthey are unqualified for raises or promotions because of their split attentionthe last two years, she wrote. “They have been torn between being a good parentand doing their own jobs, an issue that predated the pandemic but has beenmagnified.”

Grigsby, who works at the gaming company and lives inOakland, California, moved from part-time to full-time work during thepandemic, even with her two children, ages 9 and 13, at home. Now, schools areopen, though dismissal is at 1:30 p.m. on Wednesdays and after-schoolprogrammes are still limited. Her husband has started going back to the officesometimes, and because her job has fewer meetings, she is the default parent.

“While last year’s pain point is better, all these otherpain points are coming back,” she said. “All these things supporting us are notwhat they were two years ago, which was already not what we really needed.

“So I’m trying to figure out, without quitting my job, whatcan I give. Something’s got to give.”

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