Return to Office Mandates Hurt Working Parents
Want more women in the workforce? Give them flexibility.
We moved to Beacon, N.Y. in August and have met a lot of people since moving here. One thing that’s been very interesting is the number of couples we’ve met who moved to Beacon and then the woman stopped working. This is not a judgement—it’s great that women have the choice to do that, but I’ve long been interested in why it’s usually the woman, not the man, who drops out of the workforce. I started poking around, looking for some statistics earlier this year and was surprised to find that the peak of women’s labor force participation was 1999. Since then, women have been leaving the workforce. Return to Office mandates are going to accelerate that trend, I argue in a recent story:
As People Return to Offices, It’s Back to Misery for Working Moms
When I was researching women’s labor force participation, a sociologist named Paula England explained to me her work on why women and not men still drop out. A lot of it centers on women making less money than men. There are a few reasons. One: women still are more likely to study “soft” fields like the humanities and go into lower-paying “helping” jobs, so that when one parent needs to drop out for childcare reasons, it makes more financial sense for her to stop working. Second, if women do start to dominate a field, the pay drops—for instance, once women started to become the majority of park rangers, median wages dropped by 57 percentage points (here’s a very good NYT article about her research.) Third, there’s a bias against women who are mothers—one study that sent out resumes that listed PTA activity as an extra-curricular got many fewer bites from prospective employers.
This was all sitting in the back of my mind but I couldn’t find a good way into the story, so talked to my mother a little bit about her experience. When she had me and was working full-time in the 1980s, she told me, there were almost no full-time daycares and schools just let out at 3 and expected parents (moms) to pick up their kids. I asked her a bit about how she decided to be a working parent and how she knew she could do it, and she mentioned that lots of people at the time were reading Ms. magazine and it wasn’t even a question to her that she would work and have a kid.
Which made me wonder—was there something else that people like my own mother, and perhaps the editors of Ms. magazine, thought would happen in the labor force or with daycare so that their daughters and their daughters’ daughters could juggle work and parenting more easily? Universal child-care was one, but I decided to call Suzanne Braun Levine, who was the first editor of Ms. magazine, to get her perspective.
Braun Levine also has a daughter who had a baby during the pandemic, and she was telling me that she was very worried that her daughter was going to drop out of the labor force. Her daughter’s husband is a lawyer at a big firm who works all the time, she said, but he was around during the pandemic because his office was closed. Her daughter was pregnant again, but this time around, it was going to be harder, she said.
This made me start thinking about how lucky (in some ways) I was to be a first-time mom during the pandemic. Yes, I lost a lot of things by having a baby in isolation, but working from home also allowed me the headache that is going back to work a few months after you’ve given birth. It allowed Andrew be around to help me, even when he went back to work, so I wasn’t stuck at home alone with a newborn, and it allowed me to be around to help him even when I went back to work from our S.F. apartment.
Now that many organizations are issuing return to office mandates, a lot of working parents are losing that flexibility. And it makes me mad. There are lots of great things about going into an office, but with housing prices as high as they are right now, return to office mandates are forcing families to choose between tiny apartments and long commutes. The pandemic helped us realize that offices are not necessary, and that helped women and working parents most of all. For more on this, read my latest story:
As People Return to Offices, It’s Back to Misery for Working Moms
A few other recent pieces: I published a story Friday after the unemployment numbers came out, looking at the very strong jobs numbers in the context of all the layoffs that have been grabbing headlines in recent months. My conclusion: a lot of these layoffs were just CEOs cutting for the sake of looking cautious and to please their investors, not because there is necessarily an economic downturn happening. The fact that CEOs have been handsomely rewarded for laying off tens of thousands of people, and that their share prices have skyrocketed since the layoffs, makes my blood boil.
All That Recession Talk is Looking More and More Like CEO Fear Mongering
Just one example: Meta laid off 11,000 people because of the “macroeconomic downturn” but GDP has been growing for two quarters and we added half a million jobs in January. But Meta’s share price has soared since the layoffs, and Mark Zuckerberg is worth about $20 billion more than he was when he announced the cuts.
I also profiled two new airlines, Breeze and Avelo, that are serving underserved markets near you. Their business model is serving airports that the big airlines have abandoned, and using bigger jets rather than regional jets. I hope they succeed—four U.S. airlines control 80% of the market and consolidation is usually not good for consumers, but starting an airline is not for the faint of heart. More here:
Commercial Air Travel is Broken. Two New Airlines Think They Can Fix It
Like your mother, I was also influenced by MS Magazine and the feminist movement. Working for me was a given when I had my kids in the 1970’s.But it was a constant struggle because the major difficulty that prevented women from working was the same one that has continued to this day. Primarily, it is is the scarcity and expense of childcare, coupled with the shortage of decent maternity leave that obligates women to stop working outside the house. While we have experienced a great increase in women’s salaries, those mostly affect middle and upper class women. Availability of good quality childcare affects ALL women who want to work. We should follow the example provided by many other countries and stop looking for new reasons for women dropping out of the workforce.