Where Have All the Women Gone? And Does Anybody Really Care?

I first met Kari McCracken in the summer of 2020 as we were all filled with panic and uncertainty about what was then the early stage of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Data was just beginning to emerge indicating that, as companies were contracting and shedding workers or going out of business altogether, and as schools and child cares closed down, it was women who were being forced out of the workforce, at rates much higher than men, because someone simply had to take care of the children. (We now know, in research just published in The Lancet, that in the pandemic, women have been far more likely to lose their jobs than men, forgo work to care for others, drop out of school and experience a spike in gender-based violence.)

Even in 2020, we had begun to worry that women would be set back a generation or more in the move to be able to both work and have a family, rather than be forced to choose between the two. I had Kari share her story on one of the weekly live Crisis Conversations podcast episodes I was hosting on Zoom — an effort to help us all try to understand what was changing and how the pandemic was so rapidly disrupting how we work and care. 

Kari is a mother of five who lives in Kentucky. And though she lives in a community where the pressures on women are strong to drop out of paid work to stay home full-time with children, Kari loved her career. She worked in the field for a major beverage corporation, managed a big team and had the flexibility over when and where she worked that enabled her to be good at her job, with excellent performance reviews and annual pay raises, and a great mom, never missing a ballet recital or soccer game and taking kids to pediatrician and dentist appointments.

But when COVID hit, she explained, she was furloughed, as were so many workers as businesses across the globe contracted and shed workers, or went out of business altogether, leaving millions unemployed. Then that summer, her boss called and said she could have her job back. But only if she returned to work within three days. With no child care, and no summer camp or schools open, that was an impossible ask. But her company told her that if she couldn’t swing the impossible, they’d consider her to have “voluntarily resigned” — meaning she’d be ineligible for unemployment benefits.

“They literally gave up on me in three days,” she said. “They were very aware that I had a family that I was providing for. So that was the shocking part of it — it was like you're thrown to the wayside.” After all that she’d invested in her company, she felt like “just another number at the end of the day.”

Needless to say, all the men she worked with were able to return. 

“It tells a story,” she said.

So when we began working on the current season of the Better Life Lab podcast on the 10 “psychosocial” work stressors (see last week’s newsletter/ blog for more on that) and the future of work and wellbeing, and wanted to explore the future of work-family conflict, I knew it was time to find out what had happened to Kari as the pandemic dragged on.

When I reached her in late 2021, Kari said she still wasn’t able to work. Although schools and child cares were opening up again, they could also unpredictably shut down in the event of a Covid outbreak. And while she spent her days scouring job boards and applying for positions, none of them offered flexibility in when, where and how she worked like she’d had before. They all wanted workers in an office, with fixed hours and no flexibility. So Kari had become not only part of the Great Reshuffling, but one of the nearly 2 million women, according to research from the National Women’s Law Center, still missing from the workforce.

The family, now relying solely on Kari’s husband’s salary, has had to cut back on expenses. She struggles with depression and misses the part of herself that found expression and meaning not only in family, but in work, too. She worries that her daughters, who’d been so proud of her for the success of her career, blame themselves for the fact that she lost it because she’s a mother.

“Women have been losing their jobs left and right. This has set us back so far. Years and years and years. And so I don't know how we overcome it,” she said. “But in the future, I’d like to see benefits put into place for parents, mothers like myself, so when things come up, there’s something to protect us, as opposed to just letting us go.”

On this episode, we also talk to Michelle Holder, an economist and CEO of the Center for Equitable Growth. I also met Michelle during the frantic days of the Crisis Conversations. We featured her on an episode about why pandemic bailouts should focus on women of color, who have been hardest hit in the pandemic by just about any measure — unemployment, illness, stress and burnout, microaggression.

Michelle and I listened together not only to Kari’s story, but also that of Kiarica Shields, a single mother of four in Georgia who lost her job as a hospice nurse early in the pandemic, then got stuck in the vicious circle of being unable to find the childcare that would enable her to work — hospital shifts can run 10 to 12 hours — and without work, she was unable to afford whatever child care might become available. Then her unemployment benefits dried up. And though she took whatever odd jobs she could find — sorting packages on the night shift, any temp work — it was never enough to cover her bills. She wound up being evicted. Her car, repossessed. And, now living with her children in her mother’s two-bedroom apartment, along with her brother and niece, submitting hundreds of job applications a month that went nowhere, Kiarica was close to despair.

She’s had panic attacks. “And I have to remain calm, because at the end of the day, I still have kids to raise and I never want them to see me like that. So I would try to hide it as best as I can,” Kiarica said. “But it got so stressful —  that I could be driving and just break down crying. And I'm just like, how is this happening? This is like the lowest that I've ever been in my life. And I've been working since I was about 13. I don't know how I ended up here. And I'm so hard on myself because I didn't go to school and get degrees for this.”

When I asked Michelle, “Where have all the women gone?” And, more importantly, “how do we bring them back?” Her answer is clear: the system has failed women like Kari and Kiarica and millions of others. And it’s the system that needs to change. We need robust care infrastructure, and companies need to reorganize to recognize that workers also have families and lives outside of work. (Need evidence-based strategies to do that? Check out our Toolkit for Effective and Equitable Work in a Corona-normal future of work.)

“If there’s anything that came out of this massive human tragedy that was the coronavirus, at least in this country, it’s perhaps a real reckoning in the society about what is needed to have people be full participants in the economy, as workers, and particularly women workers. I think employers have to change their business-as-usual model,” Michelle said. “Employers have to reckon with this. And I would go further to say they wouldn’t reckon with it if they didn’t have to. If they continue to ignore the real needs of workers, it’s to their peril.

“It is horrible for our economy, and any economy, when millions of women exit the labor force. It is bad for productivity. It’s bad for the growth of our economy. It’s not good for GDP, our Gross Domestic Product,” Michelle continued. “It’s absolutely not a good thing for economic growth when you have millions of women leave the labor force. It’s not good for the country, but it’s also not good for the women who made that difficult choice, because any gaps in one’s work history has a deleterious effect on wages going forward, on employability going forward.”

Business as usual, in many American companies, is based on what researchers call “ideal worker” and “Iron Man” cultures that expect workers to put work before all else. That culture and leadership style creates enormous stress and work-family conflict — most significantly for those with caregiving responsibilities and among low-wage workers who, without the resources to find paid help, are more likely to carry heavy caregiving loads themselves.

The popular press is full to bursting with stories, anecdotes and reports of just how overwhelming and impossible it can be in the United States to combine work and life. Harvard Business Review reports that a majority of the senior executives who set the tone in the workplace think that work-life balance is “at best an elusive ideal and at worst a complete myth.”

Yet a vast body of research shows the work-family conflict that current work systems and leadership attitudes fosters has enormous costs: reducing organizational commitment, occupational safety and job performance, increasing turnover intentions and turnover at work, and damaging relationship and family satisfaction and increasing the likelihood of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, poor physical health, higher blood pressure and cholesterol and sleep disruption. Low-wage workers, in particular, have more demands at home and less support and control at work than professional workers.

But what if it didn’t have to be that way? The joys, demands and rhythms of family life are unlikely to change - people will continue to start families, raise children and care for themselves and loved ones. What needs to change is the way we work, and the support we provide families. What if, in a new economy, we organized around the emerging concept of work-family enrichment - the idea that the experiences in one role actually improve the quality of life in the other role? What if we organized work around care?

Work-family enrichment — a new way of working and public policies to support families — is not only key to getting the women who want paid work and careers back to work; it’s how we’ll thrive as families, businesses and as a society.