The proportion of American women working for pay is at a record high. According to a recent analysis, the increase was led by an unexpected group: mothers of children under five.
Although mothers in this group have always worked less than other women, their gains have been the largest since the pandemic. The analysis, conducted by the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project and based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, identifies a key reason: the newfound ability of certain mothers, particularly those who are married and have college degrees, to work remotely.
“What is happening to married, well-educated women with young children is crazy,” Lauren Bauer, a fellow at Brookings and author with Sarah Yu Wang, said of the analysis. “These are women who see themselves as workers. They were on an upward trend before the pandemic, then bounced back and just kept going.”
Julia Keintz took a job as head of analytics at Zillow two years ago, when her children were 6 months and 11 years old. One of the reasons she wanted the job, she said, was that since the pandemic, Zillow has allowed its employees to live wherever they want and have flexible work hours.
She lives outside San Francisco, where Zillow has an office, but rarely goes there. When her youngest was a baby, she was able to avoid lugging breast milk pumping supplies to and from work. She saves 90 minutes a day by not having to commute. She can give her older child an after-school snack and drive him to sports practices and bar mitzvah preparations.
In previous jobs, she said, she felt like she had to figure out how to balance work and raising children on her own, and that if she couldn’t, she might have to quit. “It always felt like a secret, like I was an exception,” Ms. Keintz said. “Zillow is the first company I’ve worked for where flexibility is an outward statement.”
The proportion of working women in the United States rose rapidly beginning in the 1970s with the women’s movement. For the 25- to 54-year-old age group, it topped 77 percent in the 1990s, when changes in welfare and the earned-income tax credit pushed more women into the workforce. But then it came to a standstill, even if it continued to increase in the comparison countries. Economists attribute this to the lack of family-friendly policies in the United States, such as paid leave and subsidized child care. Additionally, employers increasingly expect 24-hour availability, which is a challenge when you have children at home.
Labor force participation among all working-age adults, including mothers, increased in late 2019, just before the pandemic, as a combination of very low unemployment and certain state and local policies made the path to finding work easier.
Today, 77.7 percent of women ages 25 to 54 are in the workforce, a new high and evidence that pandemic-related school and child care closures have failed to erase decades of gains in female employment. Larger proportions of mothers of preschool and school-aged children are working today than just before the pandemic.
Several factors have led to more women entering the workforce in recent months. There have been temporary federal expansions of paid leave and child care subsidies during the pandemic, and some states and cities have made similar benefits permanent. A tight labor market likely contributed by making jobs more attractive, as did inflation, which made higher income more important. And the cultural changes that began before the pandemic have continued – women are getting more education, having children later, and investing more time and identity in a career.
But a particularly impactful change for parents, researchers say, has been remote work for people with office jobs and greater flexibility in when and where work gets done. These pandemic-related changes are also benefiting other groups, such as people with disabilities, who are also working at record levels.
Becca Cosani took a new job as a health insurance consultant when her oldest daughter, Emilia, now 3, was a baby. She called it a “scary step” because the consulting work involves constant travel, with a baby and a husband whose business, engine rebuilding, cannot be run from home.
“Women work more because they have to,” she said. “Our daycare costs more than our mortgage. I earn well and am looking for vouchers for my purchases.”
Then the pandemic hit and the trip never materialized because clients were working remotely and decided it would be more efficient. She works from her home office in Missouri City, Texas.
During breaks, she does laundry or runs errands. “This time is given back to me and I can spend it with my children when they are home,” she said of activities like riding her bike or foraging for pecans from her backyard tree. If one of them has an ear infection or is taking ballet class after school, they may withdraw.
She accompanies Emilia and Isabel, 1, home from kindergarten every day. They take it slow and stop to look at the leaves, something she would have missed while commuting or traveling, she said: “It’s just the joy of my life to be able to do that.”
The analysis didn’t include fathers, but other data suggests that those who can work from home are also spending more time parenting than before the pandemic and value flexibility more than before.
“The ‘new normal at work’ is at work here,” said Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist who won the Nobel Prize this month for her research on women’s employment. Some women who would have stopped working when their children were small have not done so, she believes: “That is the big bright spot in the pandemic.”
Mothers of babies and toddlers, an age group that requires a lot of hands-on care, have benefited the most from remote work, Hamilton Project analysis shows. Of mothers of children under 5 with a college degree, 80.3 percent are working, an increase from the previous high of 77.4 percent at the end of 2019. Almost half of them said in federal surveys that they leave home at least once a week from work, which is a much larger proportion than any other group.
Less educated, Hispanic or unmarried women are more likely to have jobs that cannot be done remotely, such as retail clerks or health care workers. Although this group has largely returned to work, their labor force participation rate is still below pre-pandemic levels: Among mothers with young children and a high school diploma or less, 54.4 percent are employed, compared to 56.1 percent at the end of 2019.
These workers are also the least likely to have an employer that offers other family-friendly benefits or a spouse with flexible work schedules. Researchers say government action would be necessary to reach all workers.
“Women who cannot work remotely need special attention,” said Misty Heggeness, an economist at the University of Kansas. “If anything good can come from our awareness and understanding of this, it is the question of how we can build better social policy and social and structural support.”
Graphics by Francesca Paris.