Quote: Four times as many women as men dropped out of the labor force in September, roughly 865,000 women compared with 216,000 men. This validates predictions that the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women—and the accompanying child care and school crises—would be severe. In July, a Washington Post article—titled, “Coronavirus child-care crisis will set women back a generation”—pointed out that “[o]ne out of four women who reported becoming unemployed during the pandemic said it was because of a lack of child care—twice the rate among men.”1 In August, CNN ran the headline, “Working mothers are quitting to take care of their kids, and the US job market may never be the same…”

The Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC) and Morning Consult found that more than 70 percent of parents of children under the age of 5 report their child care provider is closed or operating with limited hours or space. Half of the parents surveyed who sought child care for their young children during COVID-19 found it much harder to find quality child care than before the pandemic…

Interruptions caused by child care affect women more than men. Study after study has shown that in response to school, child care, and camp closings, as well as reduced hours and reduced class sizes, significantly more women than men have reduced their work hours,12 left work to care for children,13 and spent more time on education and household tasks.14 The latest evidence shows that due to COVID-19 school and child care closures, mothers with young children have arranged reductions in their work hours that are four to five times greater than the reductions arranged by fathers. These disproportionate reductions have more than doubled the gap between the number of hours worked by women and by men.15

https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/...20fathers.

I have no dog in the fight about the impact of childcare changes on the labor force, other than shock at how much teeth gnashing, denial, and odd pushback I’ve received at stating something that is plainly obvious.