The current economic downturn has left a lot of women out of work, creating what some call a "she-cession." Yahoo Finance spoke to Jamie Ladge, Associate Professor, Management & Organizational Development at Northeastern University, she explains why some women felt they needed to leave the workforce and childcare should be treated like infrastructure.

Video Transcript

- We've got just under 25 minutes left in the trading day. Dow, S&P and NASDAQ all holding on to gains. Dow back above 30,000, with all three of the major averages plus the Russell 2000 on track to close in record territory. And this all coming despite that weaker-than-expected jobs report that we got out this morning-- 245,000 jobs added to the economy in the month of November.

But despite these gains and the gains that we've seen over the last several months, there's more than 10 million Americans that remain out of work. And similar, unlike what we've seen in the past year, this recession is making it especially hard for parents-- and, in particular, women-- to work because of the pandemic and all the responsibilities that they have at home.

So for more on this, we want to bring in Jamie Ladge. She's a professor of management and organizational development at Northeastern University. And professor, it's great to have you on the program. I know that you've been collecting data on working parents since the pandemic really hit here in the US back in March. What are some of the trends you're seeing and why women in particular are being forced to leave the workforce?

JAMIE LADGE: Yeah, well thank you very much for having me. Yeah, so they're calling this the she-cession. You may hear economists use that term quite a bit, because women are disproportionately affected by the pandemic for a couple of reasons. One is because they tend to be in industries and occupations that have in-person jobs-- in service industries, health care, education sectors, which have been sectors that have been hit the hardest.

And as you mentioned, the shutdowns and reduced capacity, the daycare centers this spring, and then we've seen continue through the summer where there was no camps. And now, during the school year, which is filled with remote and hybrid learning, it's really created an unprecedented disruption on our child care system. And this is falling predominantly on women who are tending to shoulder the burden of most of those responsibilities at home.

ADAM SHAPIRO: And I was reading you've actually been studying the data on this since, literally, the S began last March. So not only do you have the hard data to show us what's happening, can you help, or is there a way to use this data to help employers bring these women back to work?

JAMIE LADGE: Yeah, so we collected data from over 2,500 working parents between Mother's Day and Father's Day. I actually worked with an all-star team at Northeastern. We had an economist and a public policy expert, Alicia Sasser Modestino, and Lisa Lincoln, who's a mental health expert. And I'm a management and work family expert. So we have all this data covering all of these different factors, and so I can address some of those things.

I want to say that one sort of thing that we've been saying all along is that we need to think about child care as infrastructure. Just in the way we think about our roads and our bridges for commuters as infrastructure, child care really is infrastructure. We have 1/3 of the US workforce, 50 million workers, have children under the age of 14 living at home. This is becoming a real problem for working parents. And it was a problem beforehand, but even harder now because there is so few child care options.

Oh, I hear a lot of my colleagues and friends will say, oh, women are opting out. Well, they're not opting out; they're being pushed out because we have so few options for child care, for daycare.

- Yeah, and you see this in your notes here that child care, it's not a family issue; it's a business issue. And kind of circling back to what Adam just asked, but drilling down more specifically, are there certain steps that companies can take just to help reassure some of their employees who are facing some of these questions or debating whether or not, maybe, they, too should drop out of the workforce at this point?

JAMIE LADGE: Yeah, well, I mean, I think we're seeing that flexibility matters a lot for employers to offer to their employees. Work from home, obviously, has been essential for a lot of these working families who have kids now that are home. So I think we have to continue that path forward, and I think employers are going to also have to get creative and step up a little bit more in continuing to offer that flexibility, offering childcare subsidies, but I would say even more importantly, to be supportive of their employees and what their needs are, in terms of manager support and then co-worker support as well, because that's really essential.

And you can offer a whole bunch of support. It doesn't mean that employees are going to take it, because there may be fear that if they take it, it's going to have repercussions for their job. But if you're going to offer that, you have to walk the talk and say, we actually support you taking advantage of these work-life policies.

ADAM SHAPIRO: Jamie, what does the data show among the women who are being forced out? Is it predominantly professional women, or is it women who are working at jobs that aren't considered professional jobs?

JAMIE LADGE: Well, this is a nationally representative sample. So across the board, we find that about 1/4 of the women-- of our entire sample, 1 in 10 working parents reported that they had lost a job or had to reduce their hours solely due to child care. Women were more affected by this, were more likely to be unemployed or reduce their hours by 25%-- so about 1/4, 1 in 4, as compared to men, which was about 13%.

So again, it was because of child care, but they're also being pushed out for other reasons, as I mentioned, because they happened to be in those industries which were particularly hit hard. Women of color were hit even harder. We saw, actually, for working parents across the board-- it didn't vary by gender-- that working parents, on average, were losing about eight hours per week due to lack of childcare. And this is, obviously, pretty significant in terms of a hit to productivity. And again, women of color are losing even more hours per week on having to care for child care due to a lack of arrangements.

- Jamie Ladge, professor of management and organizational development at Northeastern University, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Certainly a very, very important topic to discuss.

JAMIE LADGE: Thanks for having me.