This year, mothers ages 20 to 44 with young children have been leaving the workforce at a steady clip, according to a new analysis published on Wednesday. By July, the most recent month for which we have data, these women’s workforce participation rate was 68 percent, down almost two percentage points since January; this figure peaked in August 2023 at 71 percent. Meanwhile, the participation rate for fathers in the same cohort has continued rising of late and now sits at 96 percent, roughly its historical average.
There are a lot of forces behind this trend, but the big takeaway is this: It’s as if Covid-19 never happened. And that’s probably just fine with the Trump administration, which is keen to boost masculine blue-collar jobs while urging women to stay home and make more babies.
At the beginning of the pandemic, employer and government policies combined to give many workers more flexibility in their schedules and the ability to work remotely, which made working easier and more rewarding for parents of young children, especially mothers. Those policies largely have been scaled back and eliminated entirely, and the numbers of mothers of young children able or willing to work have dropped.
“What the drop in 2025 shows, in my opinion, is that when we made the environment … of flexible work a normative experience, or a normative expectation, or a normative behavior within the labor market, moms were able to accelerate their labor force participation,” said Dr. Misty Heggeness, an economist who used to work at the Census Bureau and is now at the University of Kansas. As The Washington Post reported earlier this month, she has begun tracking the job-market participation of moms of young children by analyzing the data from the government’s monthly Current Population Survey, a joint effort of the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The drop in women in the workforce is a reversal of both recent and long-term trends. In the United States, more women have slowly been joining the workforce for decades, their numbers rising to almost meet the rates of working men. But those numbers mask important differences. Those most likely to be in the workforce have bachelor’s or advanced degrees, while those least likely to work are the least educated. Rates of participation for women with young children have also risen, but they spiked during the pandemic, as the analysis from Heggeness’s team shows.
At the beginning of the pandemic, many parents lost their jobs and school closures meant they had to adapt to online school overnight, but workplaces eventually learned how to accommodate the changes. Remote work rose to a height of 62 percent of paid workdays in May 2020. The job market too became especially tight, allowing many who’d been only remotely attached to the job market—from workers with disabilities to those who split caregiving duties with paid work—to take on more work. Higher wages, pandemic supports, and workers’ ability to negotiate for other benefits also made working more appealing.
Now many companies, as well as the federal government under President Trump, are instituting stricter return-to-office policies. “There’s less support for remote work, so there’s more stigma attached to it,” Heggeness said. “Employers are more critical about it, even though we’ve proven that it’s totally possible.” For Heggeness, this shows an unwillingness on the part of employers and managers to work harder to harness the talents of the working-age population at large.
It’s clear that the Trump administration is unlikely to address the declining numbers of working women, whether they’re mothers or not. Trump promotes the return of “manly” jobs, such coal mining and steel plant jobs, and his tariff policies are aiming—though most economists agree they’re unlikely to succeed—to bring back an era of manufacturing that has long since passed. The kinds of service jobs women are more likely to do are undervalued, and the federal jobs decimated by the Department of Government Efficiency and the elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies were disproportionately held by women, especially women of color.
Meanwhile, the administration says it wants women to have more children, and is investigating incentives to encourage them to. Floated policies include a $5,000 bonus for each newborn and a “Medal of Motherhood” to women with six or more children. The recent budget reconciliation bill included a $1,000 account for children born through 2028, along with tax incentives for families to save more in those accounts, although there are practical questions about how these will work. As many critics have pointed out, these amounts pale in comparison to the actual cost of having a child in the United States today.
Rhetorically, the administration and national politicians also promote a retrograde idea of American familyhood. Rather than investing in the kinds of childcare needs that would make it easier for women to work, Vice President JD Vance wants parents and grandmothers to stay home with children. He has famously derided Democratic women as “childless cat ladies,” but he’s also suggested that families with children deserve more votes and that women who want to work and don’t have children are miserable. “You have women that think that, truly, the liberationist path is to spend 90 hours a week working in a cubicle at McKinsey instead of starting a family and having children. What they don’t realize … is that that is actually a path to misery,” he said on a podcast in 2021.
Of course, all of this is unfolding as Republicans at the national and state levels are restricting reproductive health care. Twelve states have outright bans on abortion, and seven more ban abortions early in pregnancy, and religious ideas about life beginning at fertilization have endangered access to assisted reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization. After promising on the campaign trail that health insurance companies would cover IVF, Trump never actually formed a plan to ensure this, and pronatalists are trying to promote unproven “natural” alternatives. In this MAGA view of the world, women should be expected to have more children without the right to an abortion or scientifically proven medical care, all while their ability to earn a living is increasingly compromised by less flexible workplaces.
These kinds of discussions are often framed as women’s choices, as if it’s purely up to them whether they stay at home to care for children or juggle parenthood with employment. And broader economic forces, like a labor-market slowdown and stubborn inflation, are also affecting families’ calculations about how to use their time, money, and professional skills. But women are often loosely attached to the labor market because care work falls more heavily on them. That explains why the labor force participation rate of fathers with young children has continued to rise amid the return of mandatory in-office work; it’s clear from the data who in these households has chosen childcare over work.
We as a country are letting working mothers leave the labor force without attempting to address their needs, and thus we’re tolerating an environment where everyone is a little worse off: Moms lose the income and fulfillment of a job, while the economy loses access to their talents—which, as Heggeness points out, are actually strengthened by the skills they pick up managing young children, household budgets, and home life in general. At the end of the day, we risk creating an economy that is not only less fair but less productive.
