How many working mothers have dropped out of the labor force due to the challenges of watching children who are at home during the pandemic? This is not an easy question to answer, but I want to take a rough stab at it.
First off, here are the basic numbers. Between January of 2020 and January of 2021, about 5.6 million people dropped out of the labor force. Of that, however, 2.1 million are 65 or older and are retiring, not giving up on the job market. They are also irrelevant to any analysis of working parents. So that leaves us with 3.5 million working-age people who have dropped out of the labor force.
Of that, 2 million are women and 1.5 million are men. Here's how it breaks down by age:
This chart shows that women of childbearing age are dropping out at greater rates than men, while older women are dropping out at lower rates than men. The obvious interpretation is that the excess dropout rate in the 20-44 age range (i.e., the excess of women over men) is likely due to the pressures of raising kids who are suddenly at home 24/7.
That excess comes to 700,000. This is a rough estimate, but as far as I know there's no reliable survey data that directly asks women why they've dropped out of the labor force. Still, it's probably not too far off the mark, especially since the difference in dropout rate by age is so stark.
This is about 1% of all working women. You may decide for yourself if this is a lot or a little.
The problem is that some number of women of childbearing age drop out of work when they have children even in non-COVID times. (I have known quite a few over the years.) You need a baseline to see how much higher the dropout rate is now versus 2019 to get an estimate of the number attributable to COVID.
Exactly. I just made a similar comment before seeing yours. My wife and I needed that second paycheck but for many of our friends the wife stopped working once they started having kids.
Just for clarity, retirements are often making the best of an unsatisfactory situation, including being effectively forced to retire. People over 65 who need an income -- or who simply want to work -- should not be dismissed because they are "of retirement age."
Seems like a lot to me.
The figure not only seems like “a lot”, but it also neglects those “working moms” (a silly term since ALL moms work harder than I ever will) who may not have left the workforce, but whose burdens have become more crushing than before. .... It’s kinda like how we focus on the half-mil killed by COVID and don’t pay enough attention to the many “long haulers” who didn’t die but were left crippled in some way, possibly for a long time, possibly for the rest of their lives.
Many women stop working when they have kids anyway. Many of our female friends stop working for many years once they start having kids. They then may go back once the kids are a little older. You'd have to compare Kevin's numbers here to the same charts from other (i.e. non-Covid) years. I'm guessing there would still be a big, but probably slightly less, variance in the dropout rate of women of child bearing age.