When I was 20 years old, I landed my dream internship at a prestigious Fortune 100 company. On my first day, I showed up armed with three years of college education toward a chemical engineering degree, a desire to learn and succeed, and a three-month-old baby.
Bob, my manager at the company, didn’t bat an eye. In fact, he and his family helped ensure I had consistent childcare so that I could focus on thriving at work and at home.
In the years since those early days with my now 15-year-old daughter, I’ve learned the hard lesson that Bob is the exception and by no means the standard. But that experience had a profound effect on me, and it’s why I’ve dedicated my career to helping companies better understand, and adopt, more flexible childcare policies.
A global childcare crisis
From my home country of Nigeria to the United States—where I lived and worked for 20 years—caregivers, particularly working mothers, are experiencing a crisis. Over the past 50 years, more women have joined the workforce, both because the women’s rights movement has enabled them to pursue professional careers, and out of a growing economic need for households to have dual incomes.
But despite shifting social norms and more opportunities for women, men still hold a staggering 71% of all C-suite positions in the United States. And the burden of the work at home is often still placed on the woman in a household, even if both parents are working. In fact, according to the recent “Free-Time Gender Gap” report from the Gender Equity Policy Institute, a nonprofit in Los Angeles, when both parents work, working women in the U.S. spend twice as much time as men on childcare and household work—and 3.8 times as much when women work part-time.
Women should have the autonomy to decide if and when to work, and the childcare burden that too often falls on them prevents them from doing that. This inhibits their economic opportunities and limits their economic power.
Women and 'time poverty'
The reality is that many of us are forced to leave mid-career or stop scaling our businesses because juggling parenting and working full-time is exhausting, stressful and, frankly, impossible. (In fact, I was one of these women and left my job during the pandemic to focus on caring for my growing family.) In some cases, highly skilled women never have the opportunity to take up paid work at all—often both a consequence of entrenched gender norms and a lack of other options.
Essentially, when met with the competing responsibilities of supporting a child, inadequate access to childcare infrastructure, inflexible company leave policies, and the unspoken stigma around unpaid care work, women—who are significantly more likely than men to be caregivers—experience "time poverty." This is true no matter where in the world a woman lives, and I believe it is the key to solving our current childcare crisis.
Today, when I advise private sector companies, I always start by making sure managers and employees, women and men alike, understand this concept of time poverty, which essentially means women have too many things to do—often unpaid care work—and not enough time to do them, impacting or limiting the paid work they do. Understanding this reality is crucial to solving that universal challenge of working mothers around the world: a lack of time to execute on your responsibilities, which can have a detrimental impact on your mental and physical health.
Closing the care gap
Childcare has for too long been seen as a women’s issue. In reality, addressing the challenge of time poverty would reap major economic benefits for not just women but entire households, companies, communities, and countries. I started Mother Honestly Group in 2018 in the United States and then expanded it to Africa with a nonprofit arm because I recognized that in every country, the private sector is central to the solution. We work closely with private sector companies to help close the care gap for families, workplaces, and economies through advocacy, content, and technology.
Though employers can’t create more time, they can be flexible with it. For example, one of the companies we partner with in Nigeria is Providus Bank. We serve as an Employee Care Advisory for the bank, supporting their human resources department in optimizing wellbeing solutions for their caregiving workforce. Through our parental leave program, we helped the bank make it easier to support new mothers returning to the office after having a baby. In addition to their on-ramp schedules that transition from remote work to hybrid, Providus offers a shortened workday, allowing new mothers to leave earlier, before the bank closes. Together, these initiatives provide critical opportunities to give new mothers valuable time back.
Companies also have an essential role to play in ensuring that men understand and help reconstruct the culture around care. And to be fair, it’s not always a matter of having to convince men to become invested. Our programs have shown us that when companies start the conversation about how to share the burden and make time for childcare, men lean in. We’ve learned that many modern working dads aren’t uninterested in caregiving; rather, they are lacking in critical knowledge around the basics of caregiving. During one parental leave training, a new dad confided in me that he had not prepared for the birth of his son and felt he had no idea how to feed, hold, or burp him and was afraid to mess up. I realized then and there that many men would be much more willing to step into care if they had dedicated spaces at work for learning and knowledge sharing.
A more open culture around childcare
It’s important for employers to not only start conversations about support systems and childcare options in the workplace, but also make sure these conversations get ample visibility and aren’t just relegated to the human resources department. This sends a message that solving caregiving challenges is critical for all employees to be more focused and productive at work.
In early 2022, as Mother Honestly began a partnership with a well-known U.S. company with over 14,000 employees, we were collectively beginning to recognize the impact the pandemic had on women in the workforce around the world—resulting in what a leading economist dubbed a “she-cession.” Consequently, we helped the company develop an internal program aimed at ensuring that new parents—particularly mothers—who return to work are able to do so with the resources they need to be able to grow in their roles, even as they continue to balance caregiving. From the outset, the partnership has been focused on supporting the company’s entire caregiving workforce with webinars, caregiving toolkits, training, and more.
The result at the company has been a sustained demonstration of care in the workplace, where employees feel comfortable sharing their caregiving stories and challenges without fearing repercussions. They and their managers have developed a more open culture around caregiving that feels authentic, doing things like sharing school pickups and other childcare appointments on their public work calendars, or feeling free to let colleagues know that they are “lead parent” at home while their partner is traveling for work.
For too long now, caregiving has fallen squarely on the backs of women, and we’re seeing the effects on families, societies, and entire economies. In the United States alone, between $17.1 billion and $33.6 billion annually is lost due to reduced productivity for caregiving responsibilities. But when companies intentionally invest in childcare—helping shift the culture around childcare responsibilities at home, addressing the concept of time poverty head-on, and codifying flexibility in their policies—they stimulate economic growth. And everyone wins.
More reading on childcare:
- Americans are shelling out thousands per month on childcare. Private equity could be making the crisis worse
- Childcare failures and a maternal health crisis are crushing working parents
- If you thought rent was bad, childcare now costs more than housing in all 50 states
- I would have stumbled without these 4 qualities: How women can defy gravity in their careers
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
