Calls to help US women falling out of labour force grow louder

More than one-third of parents, mostly women, have yet to return to the workforce, largely because of childcare needs.

As women have left the U.S. workforce in droves, in what some economists have deemed the first female recession, calls for structural changes to support them are growing louder. Since the pandemic took hold, more than 2 million women have dropped out of the workforce. The crisis has exposed the burdens on working women but also provided an opportunity for substantive change, according to Reshma Saujani, founder and chief executive officer of Girls Who Code. “The infrastructure of childcare is broken,” Saujani said Tuesday at the Aspen Institute’s RE$ET Conference with Bloomberg Economics. “Nobody can afford it and it’s not seen as something that we simply need in our society — and that has to change.”