For working moms, it's some good news and some bad news
The cost of childcare is higher than ever, and more moms are working. What's going on?
J_art/Getty Images
- Several stories in the news this week shine a light on mothers in the workforce.
- Women with kids under 5 are participating in the workforce at much higher rates than their peers.
- And childcare for two kids now costs more than rent in all 50 states.
For working mothers, it can sometimes feel like even when there's good news, there's also bad news.
Just this week, several stories drove home some of the things that parents and working women already have sensed.
First, some good news: Business Insider reported this week that women are the group of workers that are most successfully getting hired for high-paying jobs. My colleague Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza looked at data from a recruiting software firm with 50 million applications:
The white-collar recession means there are fewer $100K jobs — and women are landing them more often than men — Business Insider
She found that for jobs that paid over $100,000, women were a minority of applicants. But women actually landed those jobs more often than men. She found a likely reason:
An internal study from Hewlett Packard in 2014 indicated that while most men will apply for a job if they meet just 60% of the requirements listed, most women will apply only if they believe they meet all of them. This helps explain why fewer women apply but also hints at why female candidates are more successful: If women are more likely to rule themselves out, those who will apply will be higher-quality candidates.
Basically, women are better at judging whether they have a chance of getting hired at a high-paying job, so when they do actually apply, they're more likely to score it.
Of course, not all women are also parents, and only a portion of women (or anyone) in the workforce is getting those high-paying jobs. But it's a good signal for working moms.
And there's another positive story: Part-time work is booming more than ever. According to Bloomberg, more people are employed part-time or with flexible hours than ever before, and a lot of that rise is coming from working mothers.
Mothers reap benefits of record part-time workforce boom in US — Bloomberg
Bloomberg reports:
Many businesses eager to hire have accepted worker demands for part-time positions, along with other policies meant to give employees more control over their schedules. That's helped bring more women into the labor force than ever before, with about a fifth of them working part time.
Overall, the workforce's share of women — both parents and not — has increased since 2015.
One thing that stuck out to me was a chart in the Bloomberg article showing the percentage of women who are working in different groups: those with no children, teenage children, kids aged 5-12, and kids under 5.
The chart shows that since 2015, the percentage of women working across all those groups has gone up in the last 10 years. But the biggest change was for the group of women with kids under age 5. In 2015, about 64% of moms of babies and toddlers worked — in 2024 it was up to 70%.
The biggest change in that chart happened in 2020 when remote work started to become more popular. Another way to look at that is that remote work has the biggest benefit to moms of kids under 5.
Age 5 is indeed a huge turning point for a parent — that's when kids typically start kindergarten, usually at their free local public school. Suddenly, the decision and ability to work outside the home (even if remotely) is radically changed.
Free public kindergarten also can mean a radical change in the family finances — especially if they were bogged down with paying for day care or a nanny for the last five years. I wrote about this recently:
Meet the DIPS parents: Double Income, Public School. They've got it better than the POLKs, or Parents of Little Kids. — Business Insider
On that note, here's the real bad news. This week, it was reported that for the first time, childcare for two kids costs more than rent in all 50 states and more than the average mortgage in 45 states.
Childcare costs more than a mortgage payment or rent almost everywhere in the US: 'There is no escaping it' — MarketWatch
You don't have to be a genius economist to know that when childcare costs are sky-high, many women will drop out of the workforce.
For many families, the math just doesn't math to have two working parents.
But it's also more complicated. I really was interested in this article this week:
The childcare cliff that wasn't — Vox
You may recall that last summer, there was a threat of a "childcare cliff" — federal subsidies during Covid that helped carry childcare centers through the pandemic had ended, and there was a fear that thousands of childcare centers could close. Some lawmakers urged more federal funding.
The federal funding didn't happen. The "Build Back Better" bill passed without provisions for childcare and paid parental leave.
And yet … that cliff didn't really happen. In fact, as we saw above, instead of a crash of mothers dropping out of the workforce, the percentage of working mothers actually went up. This is largely because of a stronger labor market and economy. But, as Vox's Rachel M. Cohen wrote: "The lesson to take from all of this is not that people should stop advocating for policies that would improve the lives of parents, kids, and those who care for children."
If you're a mother of young children, all this probably feels like something you've already sort of noticed or experienced in your own life or among your friends. Childcare is expensive. Working is hard. Your TikTok feed is full of tradwives. The grandparents aren't available to babysit like you hoped they would.
So maybe, yes, it is harder being a millennial mom than any other generation. (And yes, if you're Gen X or older, I know you'll scoff at that.)
Being a mother is hard work. Is it actually harder on millennial moms? — The New York Times
Reading these articles this week reminded me that everything about parenting is a bit of a paradox — "the days are long and the years are short," they say about kids. It's that same mix for the state of working moms — not all good, but not all bad.