NEW YORK. There was a time when Naomi Peña seemed to be able to do everything: work full time and raise four children on her own.
But when a viral pandemic hit early last year, her personal problems began to escalate and she had to make a painful decision: her children or her job?
She chose her children. In August, Peña left a well-paid executive assistant position at Google in New York. In doing so, she has joined millions of other women who are biding their time for labor market recovery, caring for relatives, seeking affordable childcare, re-evaluating her career, or re-prioritizing work and personal life.
“I had to change course,” said Peña, 41, who said the pandemic disrupted the lives of her children and forced her to put her career on hold because she felt she was needed more at home than at work.
“I quit my paid job with amazing benefits so I ended up being able to attend with my kids,” she said.
Peña, a single mother of four children ranging from middle school to college age, knows she will eventually have to look for another full-time job – or join the earnings economy – to regain a stable income. Just not yet.
The pandemic has exposed a disproportionate burden on many women in caring for children or aging parents and has highlighted the vital role they have played in America’s workforce for a long time. The United States cut tens of millions of jobs as states began closing huge swathes of the economy in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. But as the economy recovers quickly and employers post record high job openings, many women are postponing returning to work, voluntarily or otherwise.
Even with the children back in school, the influx of women into the labor market that most analysts expected has yet to materialize. The number of women working or looking for work in September actually decreased compared to August. For men, this number has increased.
For parents of young children, the differences between men and women are obvious. Among mothers of 13 and younger children, employment rates were nearly 4% below pre-pandemic levels in September, according to Nick Bunker, director of economic research for job listing website Indeed. For fathers with young children, the decline was only 1%.
“Many women have left the workforce – the question is, how permanent will it be?” said Janet Curry, professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University and co-director of the families and children program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. “And if they’re going to come back, when will we see them? I don’t know the answers to any of this. “
Many economists and officials, including Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, speculated that opening schools would allow more mothers to find work. Until that happened. The delta option has led to the temporary closure of schools in many areas, which may have deterred some mothers from returning to work in September. The number of working mothers has been declining for the second month in a row.
Still, economists hope that with more vaccinations leading to fewer cases of the virus, Friday’s October U.S. employment report will show an increase in the number of women in the workforce. However, any gain is likely to be small, and it may take months to at least partially reverse the impact of the pandemic on women’s employment.
The main reason, according to Currie, is the increasing difficulty in finding reliable and affordable daycare centers.
This crisis, Curry suggested, “probably makes some people think for them, because if you can’t get babysitting services and you have small children, someone has to take care of them.”
In addition to caring for children, experts point to other factors that keep some women from working. The number of people who do not work because of caring for sick relatives remains high. Surveys conducted on Indeed’s job listing site have shown that many unemployed people are struggling to find work because their spouses are still working.
When the pandemic broke out in the spring of 2020, an estimated 3.5 million mothers with school-age children either lost their jobs, took leave, or left the labor market altogether, according to an analysis by the Census Bureau.
New report from consulting firm McKinsey & Co. Women in the Workplace shows how the pandemic has hit women workers particularly hard. It turned out that one in three women in the past year thought about quitting their job or “changing” their careers. In contrast, at the start of the pandemic, according to the study authors, only one in four women considered leaving.
“Women burned out even more than a year ago,” the report says, “and the burnout gap between women and men has nearly doubled.” 42% of women said they felt burned out this year. with 32% who said so in 2020. In contrast, a smaller proportion of men – 35% – felt burned this year, compared with 28% in 2020.
A few months before the pandemic, Kerin Francisco, a 51-year-old former designer for The North Face, had to decide whether to move with her company to Denver.
In the end, she decided not to leave. And as COVID-19 raged, she became more satisfied with her decision, even if it meant she would be out of work and cut her severance pay. She collected unemployment benefits and worked as a freelancer so as not to dig too deep into savings.
A single parent, Francisco wanted to focus on caring for her 10-year-old son and her elderly parents in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“It was out of a sense of responsibility and duty,” she said. “But also, to be honest, I didn’t know what was happening with COVID. So there was a lot of fear and some uncertainty that if my parents died. “
In her free time, Francisco made a discovery that had not previously seemed quite clear to her: “I am burned out.” She is currently considering the terms of her return to work full-time.
“Once you leave the corporate treadmill,” she said, “you can really catch your breath. Something inside you is changing. “
Many other women cannot afford to be so picky, even if they wanted to. Tens of millions of working women, many of whom are of color, work in low-wage jobs and struggle for rent, food, utilities and other necessities.
“There may be a labor shortage, but a lot of people are now working and doing so because there really is no choice,” said Debra Lancaster, executive director of the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University. “They have to work to put food on the table.”
Ashley Thomas, in her early 40s, said her sabbatical from her job as a public policy advocate is a temporary but much-needed respite to delve deeper into her career options.
“I had the opportunity to take a step back and just take a break – because I’ve worked hard my entire adult life,” Thomas said. “This is not a permanent break. This is a temporary break. “
Thomas said there was no single trigger for her decision to leave her job as a public policy advocate in Jacksonville, Florida. The virus played a role, although even she isn’t sure how much of a factor it was.
“I have elderly family members who may not be in the best condition, which I was very worried about,” she said. “We have two teenagers who were at home from school, and now it is very difficult for them to just not go to school and not have much contact with their friends.”
She admits that many other women cannot afford such a break from work. Thomas’s husband is still working, and her two adopted teenage children no longer need such close attention.
“Women are known to take on the brunt of the emotional labor involved in housekeeping — and beyond that,” she said. “It is likely that people will inevitably have some kind of calculation to rethink the trajectory of their lives, especially after the pandemic.”
