A few weeks before the pandemic, Melissa Colbourne went to a childcare agency on medical leave from her job as a case manager. She had planned to be out for two months, but when schools closed, she extended her leave through the summer. She is a single mother and her daughter Alyssa (now 9) was at home.
Last fall, she returned to work. Because schools are still closed in Los Angeles, where they live, she started sending Alyssa to a subsidized daycare where she does remote school.
“I have a car letter, rent, groceries to pay for, bills, so I can not just quit,” she said. Colbourne, 37, said. ‘I think it’s with a lot of African-American women. Many of us do not have much family to rely on. ”
Detailed data were not available on the experience of parents during the pandemic, and therefore researchers tried different methods to determine its effects. The census analysis examined data on parents living with school-age children. This excluded parents of infants and toddlers, an age at which mothers are less likely to work in general. It also excluded that parents who do not live with their children because the data is not available, and that supervising parents will be involved in day-to-day child care more frequently.
The analysis looked at parents who worked actively, with the exception of workers but on leave. Many more mothers than usual use paid or unpaid leave to cope with the childcare crisis. (This is a different approach than the more reported numbers, which exclude people who are not looking for work, such as mothers who stopped working until schools reopen, and people who work on most types of leave). )
Although mothers face extraordinary challenges, the census analysis also shows the ways in which they were affected by the same forces as other workers. It was found that mothers who left the workforce came largely from the service sector, this is where most of the job losses were.
Claudia Goldin, a labor economist at Harvard, made the most decisive decision about who lost her job during the pandemic. People with university degrees are more likely to be able to work from home, for employers who have stayed in their business, or to afford additional childcare.