How is the COVID-19 economy impacting millennial moms? By forcing them out of the workforce.

Center for American Progress Reports: The COVID-19 Pandemic Is Forcing Millennial Mothers Out of the Workforce

Millennials are now the largest generation in the U.S. workforce and yet they have taken the biggest hit, facing two massive economic fallouts within their lifetimes. Now, COVID-19 has brought millennial moms to their breaking point and forcing many of them out of the workforce.

During the pandemic, millennial moms are almost 3x more likely than millennials fathers to report being unable to work as a result of 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.

This all comes about as a result of the under-resourced childcare system in our country and the fact that there is 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.

Quarantine has forced many moms to cut back on expenses due to unemployment and those who are essential workers are struggling to find safe childcare.

In the new reality of the coronavirus pandemic, a growing body of evidence shows that mothers are assuming the lion’s share of housework, child care, and home schooling responsibilities. This analysis uses data from the Household Pulse Survey, which was rapidly developed and implemented by the U.S. Census Bureau to track the social and economic effects of COVID-19 on households.

We need our government to step up and pass the HEROES Act to extend unemployment benefits and to revamp our childcare system. Our economy will continue to collapse if half of the labor force is unable to work.