This week, I was reviewing a few important projects with one of my team members, when I asked about two of the women who had been leading the work. My colleague shared with me that both of the women were on voluntary furlough so that they could care for their young children due to childcare provider closures from the pandemic. She told me about a third high-potential woman who is struggling to home school her children now that their school went back to remote learning. Later that same day, I was talking to an employee who told me that she needed to reduce her hours in order to help her daughter with remote learning. I was crestfallen to hear these stories for two reasons. One, I came to the conclusion that at my organization, we are losing the talent of these young women and two, what does this say about the future of women in the workplace?

After doing a bit of research, I realized the situation we are seeing at my organization is not anecdotal. In September alone, almost 900,000 women dropped out of the workforce in the U.S. According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress (of these, 324,000 were Latinas and 58,000 were Black women.) Millennial mothers are nearly three times more likely than millennial fathers to report being unable to work due to a school or childcare closure from the pandemic. While this massive exit from the job market by young mothers is shocking, this statistic is not a product of the pandemic alone. It represents the intersection of many complex issues.

For many decades, we’ve focused on the progress women have made in narrowing the wage gap, advancing their careers while also having children and generally, “having it all.” But when you really talk to young women who are doing this, they still feel like they’re walking a tightrope and could fall off at any moment. Women are still responsible for the majority of childcare and household duties, as study after study continues to show. Despite being highly educated and represented in the workforce at unprecedented levels, Millennial women are making less than Gen X women. This is in part, due to entering the workforce during the largest economic downtown since the Great Depression. According to the Atlantic, “The generation unlucky enough to enter the labor market in a recession suffers “significant” earnings losses that take years and years to rebound, studies show, something that hard data now backs up.”

The verdict is that this resulted in a full decade of lost wages for this generation of women. 

On top of all of this, the childcare crisis parents are experiencing right now, while amplified, isn’t really new. For example, nearly 2 million parents had to leave work, change jobs or turn down a job offer because of child care obligations in 2016. For 62% of full-time working parents, child care is unaffordable according to a 2018 survey by the Institute for Child, Youth and Family Police at Brandeis University. In fact, the expense of childcare was cited as the number one reason for our declining birth rate according to another survey conducted by the New York Times. 

The culmination is a generation of working mothers who are underpaid, overstretched in terms of household duties, spending an outsized proportion of their income on childcare (as well as the cost of their labor to find, interview, coordinate and manage childcare) and who still feel the extreme pressure of navigating their career growth while raising children (women were found to be twice as likely as fathers to feel their work performance is being judged negatively because of their caregiving responsibilities during the pandemic.) A recent US News & World Report article describes the end result well, “Many working mothers are feeling burned out by the overwhelming demands of both work and home.” 

As leaders, it’s important to recognize that what working mother’s feel did not happen overnight. In 2018, just 28% of mothers with children under 18 said that working full time was ideal (according to the Institute for Family Studies). While I worry deeply about the long term effects of this current crisis for our young working mothers, I am also more committed than ever to supporting the conditions that lead to bringing them back in enthusiastically. This means advocating for changes in how we fund childcare and childcare workers, continuing to look for ways to close the wage gap between not just men and women, but also between women of color, millennial women and older generations, and continuing to push organizations to think about how they support parents to navigate this very complex issue.