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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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