Photo: Ketut Subiyanto from Pexels

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the United States to acknowledge how weak its child care system is – and how child care’s struggles can quickly create chaos for working mothers.

Abigail Usherwood, a Strategies for Children intern, explores this issue in the newly released policy brief, “COVID-19 and Gender Inequality in the Workforce.”

Even before the pandemic, Underwood writes, women establishing their careers faced more challenges than men. There is still a stubborn wage gap: nationally, for every dollar men earn, women earn $0.81.

Factor race in, Usherwood explains, and the problem grows worse.

“In the United States, Black women lag even further behind in terms of the gender wage gap. On average, for every $1.00 a white, non-Latino man makes, a Black woman will only earn $0.63.”

Factor in the pandemic, and it’s clear that women are under intense pressure from the expectation that they will “balance household duties, like child care, with career responsibilities, and, during the pandemic, remote schooling. All of these responsibilities compound, creating barriers for women to progress in the workforce.”

One economically devastating outcome is a gender-based workforce participation gap:

“Women with their youngest child under the age of three years old have a 61.8% labor participation rate, compared to men who have a 94.2%labor participation rate. Although the largest disparity is seen between men and women with youngest children under the age of three, women with children across all age groups have a lower labor participation rate than men in the same circumstances. This is true across all race and ethnicities of mothers, especially in White, Asian, and Latina women.”

Women who have been squeezed out of the workforce by their responsibilities can’t help support their families, and they can’t contribute to the growth of the global economy.

Solutions are at hand. 

Usherwood points to Massachusetts where state legislators have filed the Common Start bill, which would establish a universal preschool program. The bill’s long, explanatory name is “An Act providing affordable and accessible high quality early education and care to promote child development and well-being and support the economy in the Commonwealth.”

In addition, “the Department of Early Education and Care is structuring a new parent fee schedule. The proposal would ensure parents accessing child care subsidies aren’t paying more than 7% of their income towards the subsidies’ parent fee, and that parents in poverty wouldn’t have to pay fees at all.”

At the federal level, Congresswoman Katherine Clark’s (D-MA) has filed the “Child Care is Infrastructure Act,” which would “improve the quality of early education programs in the nation, treating them as vital infrastructure.”

Usherwood also calls for workplace solutions, noting, “Business leaders need to commit to non-discriminatory policies for women, but specifically mothers.”

Policy researchers point out, Usherwood writes, that employers could help by “offering on-site child care, offering child care spending accounts, offering child care subsidies, creating predictable and flexible schedules depending on employee needs, and creating a system for back-up child care assistance.”

In other words, despite the massive size of this problem, there is a win-win scenario: making it easier for mothers to work would create local, national, and global economic benefits.

As Usherwood concludes, “advocates, policymakers, and businesses have a responsibility to change the systems that negatively impact women’s abilities to prosper in our current workforce” by mitigating barriers like the widespread lack of affordable, high-quality child care to “open new pathways for women in the workforce.” To learn more, please check out the policy brief.