The Pandemic's Lasting Impact on Mothering and Employment

A year ago, I started drafting a post on COVID and parents’ work hours. I’m finally finishing it.

The COVID crisis fundamentally shifted my allocation of time, as it did for many working mothers. The week I started this blog post, I’d built countless structures out of MagnaTiles, spent hours digging in the sand, splashed in the wading pool, and gone berry picking.

What I hadn’t spent much time on was my job. In this sense, I was typical: During the coronavirus pandemic, mothers reduced their working hours far more than fathers. In fact, according to a preliminary study, among dual-earner heterosexual couples who were both able to telecommute, mothers reduced their paid working hours 4 to 5 times more than fathers (Collins and Landivar, interviewed by Kitchener 2020).

In many ways, the couples in this study were privileged. They were able to work from home, and they generally enjoyed well-paying jobs. But they were also an important bellwether, providing a strong test of whether gains in gender equality could withstand COVID-19. Highly-educated couples tend to hold more egalitarian attitudes, and with both spouses working from home, they could have shared the increase in parenting time equally. But they did not.

Of course, these pressures were (and still are) intensified for workers who cannot work from home. Highly-educated, white, and Asian American workers are disproportionately able to telecommute, while less-educated, African American, and Latinx workers are not (Gould and Shierholz 2020). Moreover, those who are unable to telecommute are also more likely to be living paycheck to paycheck.

My own shift towards nearly full-time motherhood was, at least in large part, because my spouse works in an essential occupation and cannot telecommute. We were also searching for a new nanny, which was complicated by our employment in jobs with relatively high COVID-19 exposure.

Fortunately, I savored the opportunity to spend extra time with my then-3-year-old. However, I enjoyed more job security (tenure) than most working mothers, and the demands of my job are reduced during the summer. (Unexpectedly teaching class online in Spring 2020 while home alone with a small child was a different matter altogether.)

Long-term career trajectories

What interests me now is how the forced changes in time allocation have altered long-term career trajectories. This summer, I have a wonderful nanny, but, like last summer, I’ve been spending a substantial portion of time playing with my now-4-year-old, doing science experiments and art projects, and taking him on outings. I also have a new baby to snuggle. My children will only be young once, and I do not want to miss this joyful time with them.

I am deeply aware that my ability to have a choice is a privilege—many (if not most) parents do not have quality childcare and have substantially less control over their use of time. Nevertheless, by choice or constraint, the COVID-19 crisis has changed how parents—especially mothers—balance and prioritize work and family.

Indeed, my colleague, Abigail Ocobock, has found that many of the parents she interviewed appreciated the increase in family time brought about by the pandemic, even as they experienced increased stress balancing work, family, and homeschooling (Sharkey 2020). Ocobock also found that the struggle to balance these competing obligations was disproportionately born by mothers, even when both parents were employed full time and working from home (Sharkey 2020).

Parental tensions and the decline of births

The pandemic increased the challenges of combining work and family, but for the most part, it exacerbated already-existent tensions. American workplace culture is largely unsupportive of parents, and public policy does little to help.

In recent decades, demands on workers have grown simultaneously with demands on parents—both employment and parenting have become more time-intensive (Tavernise et al 2021). Parenting has also become more expensive, even as wages have stagnated (Tavernise et al 2021). Indeed, although COVID-19 is estimated to have resulted in roughly 40,000 fewer births in the final month and a half of 2020 than would have otherwise occurred, fertility rates have been declining for years (Kearney and Levine 2021).

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It is unclear as yet whether these births will be delayed (resulting in a small baby boom as the crisis abates) or foregone. Insofar as women are increasingly focused on educational attainment, career advancement, financial security, and personal fulfillment—and are intentionally delaying or forgoing motherhood to achieve these goals—COVID-19 is likely to speed the transition towards lower long-term U.S. fertility rates. Even if the women who were forced to leave or deprioritize work during the pandemic retain their shift in focus away from paid employment, I doubt that economic recovery will bring a rebound in fertility. Parenting during the crisis was hard, stressful, and much more time-intensive, driving up the financial and opportunity cost of children (Slotnick 2021).

Tellingly, fertility declines were steepest among women between the age of 15 and 24 and above age 35 (Kearney and Levine 2021). For the youngest women (15-24), COVID-19 might delay births, as these women have yet to reach the age at which U.S. women most often give birth. For the oldest women, these might represent births forgone, especially as women in that age group are disproportionately likely to already have other children (Kearney and Levine 2021). Unfortunately, due to data limitations, demographers have not been able to analyze declines in fertility by many of parents’ personal characteristics, besides age (Kearney and Levine 2021).

Employment rates, wages, and the gender gap

As yet, data also cannot reveal the long-term consequences for gender parity in employment and wages. In the medium-term, mothers' decrease in work hours will likely increase the gender gap in earnings, at least among parents, and has almost certainly increased the gender gap in paid work hours (Kurzleben 2020, Kitchener 2020). Returning to work after taking time off for children has never been easy, and the career cost of motherhood has always been substantial, factors which suggest longer-term repercussions. That is, for many mothers, the decrease in work hours was temporary, but the career consequences may last much longer.

As I post this, I'm holding my newborn daughter in my arms. She was born into a world of masks, growing inequality, and steep employment penalties for mothers. I hope her future is one of growing equality, opportunity, and health.