It is eighteen months later, and Sakhon Nhek is still waiting to send her youngest back to daycare. She is among many parents whose access to childcare was all but eliminated due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
As a self-employed photographer in Napa Valley, Nhek already enjoyed more freedom and flexibility in her schedule than most. But when the world shut down, so did her access to care, putting her back in the same boat as millions of women who needed to decide between going to work and implanting a babysitter in their homes, with all the associated costs.
When it comes to careers as well as caregiving, the pandemic has threatened working women the most. At the height of the pandemic, women in the United States lost more than 5.4 million jobs, almost 1 million more than men. This is primarily because more women held positions in hospitality, education, and retail, which were more significantly impacted by closures than other industries.
Our nation entered the pandemic with an unresolved, uneven burden of caregiving on women, with women responsible for the majority of childcare, whether they had jobs or not. During the pandemic, women left jobs to care for children who couldn’t go to school. According to a survey conducted by The New York Times in April 2020, in households with children under the age of 12, women reported spending more time on homeschooling than men.
The need to balance work and caregiving is nothing new for mothers, but COVID-19 highlighted the ongoing issue. There are still 1.8 million fewer women in the workforce compared to pre-pandemic times, and they are returning to work at a much lower rate than men, only possibly by choice. Realizing just how fragile the pre-pandemic balancing act has become, families are finding ways to adjust their living costs by relocating and adapting to life on a single income while often the female in the household is taking more time to look for opportunities that provide more flexible hours or the ability to work from home.
Women like Nhek are choosing entrepreneurship to navigate the challenging situation of childcare, both before and after the pandemic. "After photography school, I had dreams of teaching or working for magazines, leading a team. But I also had a young baby. I couldn't justify paying for childcare so I could go to work at those kinds of jobs," says Nhek.
Even in the creative field of photography, traditional shoots require nontraditional hours and often occur on days when conventional sources of childcare are unavailable. "By owning my own business, I can work around the family schedule and my husband's work schedule."
While Nhek’s career already required navigating schedules, with the pandemic, it became even more difficult. When schools declared her children would be home for good, Nhek was back in the position of needing childcare. "My husband was able to help in the beginning because he was at home too, but once he went back to work, one or both of my children were then [and still are] with me in the studio. And there are no days off."
The pandemic has reminded some women like Nhek of the career-stunting that can correlate to gender. "Having children does slow down the career path,” Nhek reflects. “To do this, I've made a lot of sacrifices, and I'm making peace with that."
Living a few miles away from Nehk is Kira Ballotta, a young mother with two children under five. A talented winemaker, Ballotta made her way out of finance and into the wine industry well before the pandemic. But in the early stages of her pregnancy, she felt limitations. Many aspects of the wine industry rely heavily on the seasonality of the job and require work on weekends when childcare options are limited.
"In 2018, we were really short-staffed,” Ballotta describes. “The team worked fifteen hours a day, seven days a week." At that rate, there was no way she would see her young children. When her employer offered her a more flexible work schedule than the rest of the team, she experienced resentment from colleagues who did not understand why she was given the ability to modify her work schedule, what they perceived as preferential treatment.
As Head Winemaker and Partner of Olivia Brion Wines, Ballotta’s job now allows her to manage her children. She puts her kids down for a nap, drives to the vineyards, and is back home in time to make dinner. "It had to be my own hours in winemaking, or I'd have to find a totally different job." Self-employment is not what Ballotta wanted, but it was the most logical choice to keep her two priorities alive: being a winemaker and being a mother. "Now, I call myself a business owner that makes wine," she says.
The question becomes: are we all fine to say that certain careers are not for new mothers, or do we need to adjust industries to make sure they can include these people? Self-employment should not be the only way some women can access certain industries.
While remote work in specific sectors is trending, jobs in hospitality, education, childcare, and government – where the overwhelming number of women are – do not allow for that flexibility. So that means women need to be in COVID-threatened environments, wearing masks indoors, and also, paying for childcare. Given these factors, it should be no surprise that women are slow to return to work as the world reopens.
The average cost of childcare in the United States for an infant is $14,760 a year. When the average household income is $79,900, that means a typical family is spending around 18% of their earnings on childcare alone. The federal definition of affordable childcare is 7% or less of the annual income. With this standard unmet, families are choosing to have one partner stay at home and opt out of jobs altogether, if that is even an option. And most often, it’s the woman.
One non-profit organization in Napa, the UpValley Family Centers, is providing support and resources to nearly 4,000 in-need individuals in the Napa Valley community every year. During the pandemic, the organization responded to the significant increase in need due to job loss, home loss, and financial insecurity. Its focus on wellness, programs for youth, economic success, and community engagement helped educate and empower individuals to address some of the systemic inequities that the pandemic brought into the spotlight.
“The UpValley Family Centers has been the primary resource for people who live and work in the northern Napa Valley,” says Jenny Ocon, the organization’s executive director. “The Family Centers is working towards a full recovery for all – especially those who had little to fall back on when hard times hit – to ensure everyone in our community is more stable and secure over the long-term.”
Creating a working environment that supports working parents should not be hard to achieve, especially not at our biggest companies – this would mean flexible hours, equitable pay, and that employees who prioritize caregiving are subsidized or given equal opportunities to their peers for upward mobility. Employers should publicly shift their cultures to attract the most educated and talented prospects, whether they have children or not.
In industries where it feels less possible to modify the environment to accommodate the needs of a parent, we may just suffer the loss of fewer women. Let’s not let this happen. Who else among us can step in here?