This year, working women across the U.S. hit a breaking point. More than 450,000 have left the workforce since January—one of the sharpest declines in recent history, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And, overwhelmingly, the women most likely to walk away are mothers with young children.
The forces pushing women out of their jobs aren’t mysterious. They’re the same ones that have been building for years: childcare that’s both unaffordable and hard to secure, workplaces pulling back on flexibility, and the reality that the U.S. remains the only developed country without national paid leave. While millions more women are still clocking in each day, the strain of holding everything together is getting harder to hide.
