When We Talk About Mothers and Work During the Pandemic, Words Matter
By Moira O’Neil and Nat Kendall-Taylor
This Sunday we all need to take a minute to acknowledge how hard mothers have been hit by the pandemic.
Nearly four times more women than men have lost jobs since the beginning of pandemic and data suggest that it’s been worse still for working mothers.
While the media has reported extensively about these gender differences, the way they have been advancing these data and statistics is misrepresenting the problem and distracting us from necessary policy actions.
There is a dominant frame — a way of positioning the issue — that has been circulating about women and work during the pandemic.
The “women leaving the workforce” frame presents the issue as being about mothers choosing to forgo work and wages. Precious little of our public discussion has framed this issue as one in which women are being forced to leave the workforce because of downsizing, layoffs, or a lack of available childcare. Headlines abound about women “contemplating leaving,” “dropping out” of the workforce, or “preferring to stay at home.”
The choice frame was most apparent in media profiles about the “workforce exodus.” For example, a Time magazine article told the story of a woman who “left her six-figure marketing job at a financial services firm” and had “mixed feelings about her decision.” We heard a lot about middle- and upper- class women who can afford to leave the workforce and who have mixed emotions about leaving their jobs.
But when we actually listen to women it becomes clear that, in most cases, choice has got nothing to do with it.
Recent research conducted by the RAPID-EC project at the University of Oregon shows that over a third of women surveyed were forced to leave the workforce or reduce their hours and 82 percent of the women who left the workforce could not afford to do so. Women who were forced to leave their jobs, whether they said they could afford it or not, reported higher levels of distress than women who were not forced. And importantly, so did their kids. This is hardly the media’s picture of women “deciding” to take a break from the workforce to spend more time with their young children.
Framing the stats around women and work during the pandemic as matter of “leaving” or “choice” does not reflect reality. And without adequate attention to the forces shaping women’s decisions, this kind of coverage clouds our thinking about what we need to do to address the issue with public policies, like pay equity or workplace policies that account for the needs of working mothers.
We could tell the story another way. We could focus on gross pay inequities prior to the pandemic that have forced mothers rather than fathers to leave their jobs. We could continue to highlight the “double shift” or how working women take on the vast majority of caregiving responsibilities in households so that they are the ones who have to leave the workforce. Or we might tell a story of a generalized de-valuing of women’s labor that has made them expendable in times of economic crisis.
Sunday is set aside as a day to honor mothers. One way to do this is by changing the ways we talk about mothers and work. We need to stop talking about the choices they have made to leave the workforce and start talking the forces and reasons that have pressured and led to those decisions. We need to widen the lens and focus on the factors that policy makers can address to get women back to work.
Biden’s families act will increase the affordability, quality, and reliability of childcare. This is a step in the right direction, and we need to go further. We need to uplift the value of having mothers in the workplace and the importance of creating workplace policies and childcare infrastructure that enables their full contribution — to their places of employment and to our country.
Moira O’Neil and Nat Kendall-Taylor are the Vice President of Research Interpretation and CEO at the FrameWorks Institute, a communications research think tank.