The Pandemic Has Been Punishing for Working Mothers. But Mostly, They’ve Kept Working. [nytimes.com]

For mothers during the pandemic, the usual push and pull of work and family life has felt more like a tug of war. Yet despite concerns that they would quit their jobs en masse, most succeeded in keeping them, two new data analyses show.

In fact, one group of mothers — college graduates with babies and toddlers — became significantly more likely to work for pay than they were before the pandemic.

As of March, slightly more mothers of school-aged children are working than they were in the March before the pandemic.

It is a testament to American women’s attachment to the labor market, researchers said — they have hard-earned careers, built over time and central to their identities, and are increasingly primary breadwinners for their families. It also speaks to the value of flexibility over when and where people work.

“The real story of women during the pandemic is that they remained in the labor force,” Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist and leading scholar of women and work, wrote in one of the new analyses. “They stayed on their jobs, as much as they could, and persevered.”

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