A few weeks before the pandemic hit, Melissa Colbourne took sick leave from her job as a case manager at a child care agency. She had planned to be gone for two months, but when schools closed, she extended her leave over the summer. She is a single mother and her daughter Alyssa, now 9, was at home.
Last fall, she went back to work. As schools are still closed in Los Angeles, where they live, she started sending Alyssa to a subsidized daycare center, where she studies at a remote school.
“I have a car ticket, rent, groceries to pay, bills, so I can’t just get up and go,” said Colbourne, 37. “I think that’s what happens to a lot of African American women. Many of us don’t have many families that we can count on. “
There is no detailed data available on the parents’ experience during the pandemic, so the researchers tried several methods to determine the effects. The census analysis examined data on parents living with school-age children. It excluded parents of babies and young children, an age when mothers are less likely to work. It also excluded parents who do not live with their children because data is not available and parents in custody are more likely to be involved in the daily care of their children.
The analysis analyzed parents who worked actively, excluding employees, but on leave. Many more mothers than usual are using paid or unpaid leave to deal with the child care crisis. (This is a different approach from the most frequently reported job numbers, which exclude people who are not looking for work, such as mothers who stopped working until schools reopened and have people on many types of leave as employees).
Although mothers are facing unusual challenges, the census analysis also shows the ways in which they were affected by the same forces as other workers. He found that mothers who left the labor force were largely from the service sector, which is where most of the job losses occurred.
More than parental status or gender, education was more decisive for those who lost their jobs during the pandemic, said Claudia Goldin, a Harvard labor economist. University graduates are more likely to be able to work from home, work for employers who have remained in the market, or to be able to pay for additional childcare.