When companies started to push employees back to the office, many of us warned that mothers would be pushed out of the job market.
That prediction is becoming reality: The percentage of women in the workforce aged 25 to 44 with children under five plummeted nearly three percentage points between January and June before slightly rebounding in July.
The drop brought the share of working moms of young kids to its lowest level since 2022. That’s a massive decline, but you won’t find it referenced in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly jobs report. The figure comes from analysis done by University of Kansas professor Misty Heggeness, a one-time economist at the Census Bureau, and measures what she calls a “girlie statistic.”
The BLS — and U.S. government more generally — have never been all that concerned with girlie statistics. Those are indicators that relate to the unpaid labor that takes place inside the home, which is predominantly child care. Instead, all the attention goes to the “manly” spaces of the economy, Heggeness says — the paid work that takes place outside the home.
But omitting girlie statistics obscures the complete economic picture by failing to capture the realities of the modern workforce. And it often means we end up making all sorts of stereotypical and incorrect conclusions about women in the labor market.
Case in point: Unmarried mothers with young children have experienced even more severe declines in labor force participation than the rest of their cohort, deflating the outdated theory that most women “opt out” because they have a husband’s salary they can rely on.
Examining some additional girlie statistics can help us understand what’s behind the overall decline. Labor force participation for mothers of young children hit a high in the summer of 2023 at 71.2%. By this June, that number had fallen to 66.9%. Meanwhile, men with children are participating in the workforce at higher rates than they were at the start of the year.
One reason we saw this cohort’s participation peak in 2023 is because companies were then building corporate cultures that acknowledged working moms’ value to the economy. Pandemic-era policies that allowed for flexibility and work-life balance were still in place.
Today, corporate America shrugs at some of those concerns; the manly economy is back on steroids. It’s the five-day-a-week return to office mandates and demands for longer hours. It’s the call for more masculine energy in corporate America and the rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. It’s forcing out critics and requiring employees to pledge their loyalty.
Another sign: Employers are doing their own erasure of girlie statistics. Last week, The Conference Board reported that the share of S&P 500 companies disclosing data on women in management dropped by 16% compared to last year, while those reporting the overall share of women in their workforces fell 14%.
“If you want to ignore or hide a social problem, you just stop collecting the data,” says Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at Stanford University’s VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab.
Still, there is one statistic that complicates this picture: levels of hybrid work and work-from-home have been flat the last three years. And women in particular have resisted returning to the office; a new survey from the Labor Department found that the number of employed women who reported spending time working from home has remained at 36% year-over-year. For men, that figure dropped five percentage points to 29%.
So, if the share of women with flexible work arrangements is holding fast, why are moms leaving? Stanford economics professor Nick Bloom has a persuasive theory — the compliance gap. He posits that many big companies are announcing strict return policies, but not following through on enforcement. “This may still be enough to scare women out of the labor force,” Bloom told me via email. “It’s not great if you are trying to organize child care to have the risk of your boss suddenly enforcing a mandate, as it generates a lot of uncertainty and makes it hard to plan.”
Heggeness notes that many of the bosses imposing these new mandates have someone in their lives who handles the care work — be it providing child care or doing the cooking, cleaning and planning — so they can focus on work outside the home. That distance from day-to-day care work can make it harder for them to understand its intrinsic worth, she says.
We would all have a better grasp of the value of the care economy if we paid attention to these pesky statistics. One study that Heggeness cites found that unpaid care work in the U.S. in 2020 was valued at $5.3 trillion, or about 25% of the GDP. “The economy we do measure does not function without this underbelly of unpaid care work,” she wrote in a 2023 paper that calls for a more holistic definition of economic activity.
But the possibility of taking girlie statistics seriously seems further away than ever. The Trump administration’s nominee for the BLS doesn’t even take manly data seriously, having suggested suspending the monthly jobs report. Caregivers already know the devastating consequences of what it means not to have your work counted. The rest of us soon could, too.
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