Center for American Progress, August 12, 2020: The COVID-19 Pandemic Is Forcing Millennial Mothers Out of the Workforce
A new Center for American Progress analysis of the Household Pulse Survey finds that during the COVID-19 pandemic, Millennial mothers are nearly three times more likely than Millennial fathers to report being unable to work due to a school or child care closure. Indeed, Millennial men have largely embraced gender equality when it comes to paid work, but research has found that these attitudes rarely extend to child care responsibilities. Today’s heterosexual couples may aspire to more egalitarian parenting and housework, as evidenced by women becoming a majority of the paid labor force for the first time in nearly a decade in December 2019. The data, however, tell a different story, as women are often responsible for a much greater share of child care and household labor. Meanwhile, 80 percent of the 11 million single-parent families are headed by women.
The relatively meager work-family policies in the United States translate to an under resourced child care system and no guaranteed federal paid family and medical leave. While the Families First Coronavirus Response Act and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act provided funding for businesses to extend paid sick and caregiving leave to their workers, lobbyists for big business inserted exemptions that, among other things, excluded all workers in businesses with more than 500 employees from such paid leave provisions. As they have for generations, women have shouldered most of the unpaid domestic work, even as their roles as financial breadwinners have grown. Indeed, more than 60 percent of mothers are now the sole or co-breadwinners of their household.
