Hybrid revolution leads to surge of working moms. But can they have it all?

More American women with young children are working than ever before. The surprise surge of moms returning to work since the pandemic has been celebrated, with some even predicting it will narrow the gender pay gap.

The rise of remote work appears to be helping women stay in the labor force after having kids, which has clear benefits for the economy and individuals. But hybrid work may not be a golden ticket to career advancement and satisfaction.

Band-Aid over a bullet hole

A 2023 Hamilton Project report found 70.4% of moms with kids under 5 were working, an all-time high. This tracks with broader trends in the labor force, especially among college-educated women. Experts believe the spike in young moms’ workforce participation since the pandemic is driven in part by remote work, because the more education women have, the more likely they are to remain in the workforce after having kids.

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Education in this case is used as a proxy for the ability to work from home. Women without college degrees, who are less likely to have jobs that allow them to work from home, are not seeing the same levels of workforce participation. And while not all caregivers identify as women or mothers, those are the identities captured in the Labor Bureau data supporting the report.

What the data fails to capture is the emotional and professional cost of juggling the full-time jobs of career and domestic labor. Faced with the high costs and long wait lists of child care, many parents are cobbling together alternating work schedules and leaning on flexibility, as we’ve reported.

The burden of child care and domestic labor falls disproportionately on women in heterosexual couples — women like Skye Henley, an interior designer who lives in Seattle. She and her husband can’t afford child care for their two youngest children, so she works from home, often early in the morning and late into the night.

Henley worries about the “hours of TV time” her kids get while when she and her husband are tied up with work.

“Hours of, ‘I need you to be quiet because I'm on a call time.’ That's different from hours of unstructured time, when they can actually play and make noise," Henley said. "It's really different when you're like, ‘I'm on a call. You can't bother me. I'm doing this very important thing and so I'm just going to put you in front of a screen to make you're quiet and docile.’ I'm very, very, very concerned about how much of that is happening and what that means for our children going forward.”

What Henley and many other women in her position have realized is that working from home is not a substitute for affordable, accessible child care.

Angela Garbes, a Seattle author who writes about motherhood, work, and domestic labor, describes remote work as a Band-Aid over the bullet hole that is America’s child care crisis in the latest episode of "Booming," KUOW's economy podcast.

“Feminism was like, go find meaning for yourself outside of the home,” she said. “Go pursue it in work, which is wonderful for a lot of people. That never solved the issue of domestic labor and who's going to care for your kids.”

Unlike many wealthy nations, the U.S. does not offer government-funded universal child care. It’s a difficult hole for the private sector to fill. Despite high demand, day cares can only charge parents so much before it makes more financial sense to hire a nanny. Liability regulations and laws mandating caregiver-to-child ratios mean costs are high and margins thin for facilities. The result is a system of low wages for workers and high costs for parents. The industry, already stretched thin, was pushed to a crisis point by the pandemic when many centers closed and never re-opened.

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Democrats have tried dozens of times to pass federal child care legislation in the U.S. Since 2020, child care benefits have been cut or diluted from legislation nine times, according to a CNN analysis.

Republicans have criticized President Joe Biden’s child care plans as a vehicle to push a liberal agenda in which women work outside the home, rather than raising children. It’s a position conservatives have used throughout U.S. history to block child care and pre-K legislation.

“Until we solve at the root the care problem in America, until we have universal health care, until we have paid family leave, until we have paid sick leave, until we have affordable child care, pre-K, it's always going to be a problem,” Garbes said.

In lieu of federal action, the burden of child care falls largely on individuals, and for many women comes at the cost of career advancement.

The new ‘mommy track’

The rise of remote work exposed an ideological divide between many managers and employees. Over the past year, bosses have been met with frustration — and sometimes outright rebellion — when implementing “return to office policies.” Employers like Amazon now use in-office attendance as a datapoint in performance reviews.

The premium employers place on being in the office could have real implications for parents, often mothers, who need to work from home more frequently to care for children and domestic needs.

A recent study by the career site Ladders found the share of high-paying remote jobs is shrinking. Just 3% of job listings for positions paying more than $200,000 a year offered hybrid schedules, down from 16% at the beginning of 2023. Remote workers were promoted 31% less frequently than their colleagues last year, according to a report from an employment data firm cited by the Wall Street Journal.

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It’s the latest twist in an old story. Women earn less than men on average, and mothers pay the highest penalty in lifetime earnings. Often that’s because women choose less demanding career tracks to keep up with outsized responsibilities at home. Since the pandemic, more white-collar jobs than ever before come with the option to work from home at least some of the time. That option can be liberating for new parents, but it also means missing out on spontaneous interactions and after-work happy hours that often give employees a competitive edge.

“It is effectively a new mommy track unless like the thing that really changes with this flexibility is you have people who understand caregiver needs making [hiring] decisions,” Garbes said.