Opinion | College-educated moms are powering the economy. Will their gains last?

Instead, the opposite has happened. The she-cession flipped into a spectacular she-covery.

“Women today see themselves as ‘people who work,’” says Brookings Institution researcher Lauren Bauer, “and the pandemic was not going to get them down.”

Women in the workforce are doing better than ever, with a record share of those considered prime working age (25 to 54 years old) holding a job. Their employment gains have benefited more than just those women and their families. They have also helped power our post-covid economic miracle and, so far at least, steer the country away from recession.

To be clear, American women have not merely recovered all the ground lost during those early covid lockdowns; they’re more likely to work today than at any prior time in history. The same is not true of similarly aged men, whose employment rates remain higher than women’s but peaked back in the 1950s.

Women’s economic gains come with some important asterisks, however. The progress is not equally shared; the employment increases are occurring overwhelmingly among one subpopulation of female workers, arguably those who had more resources and power over their careers to begin with. And some of the factors that have enabled even this group to succeed might be fragile.

But first let’s talk about the educational achievements that have given women a leg up these past few years.

In 2002, roughly the same shares of prime-age men and women, about 30 percent, had college degrees. Then the two sexes diverged. Over the next 20 years, the fraction of women with at least a bachelor’s degree climbed nearly 16 percentage points, compared with just nine percentage points for men. Because people with more education are generally more likely to have jobs — higher wages, too — it was perhaps predictable that larger shares of women with college degrees would lead to big gains for women’s employment.

What’s striking is that even within the group of college-educated women, the share working today is vastly higher than it was a couple of decades ago. This is driven by one particular subset of the group: college-educated moms, according to a new analysis from researchers at the Penn Wharton Budget Model.

For other groups of women — those without college degrees, or those who have college degrees but don’t have children — employment rates today are close to their 2002 levels.

Keeping a foothold in their careers has somehow become more manageable for, or perhaps more important to, college-educated mothers. Other metrics show that family responsibilities appear to be pulling many fewer of them out of the workforce than was the case 20 years ago, especially for moms of the youngest children.

There are many possible explanations for these shifts. One is obviously the pandemic-related rise of remote work. Such arrangements are more often available to women with more education, presumably because they disproportionally go into white-collar professions (marketing, accounting, law), as opposed to the kinds of occupations that must be done in person (such as retail, food service, hairdressing).

The option to work remotely might have made balancing work and family commitments more manageable by giving time to these workers they might have otherwise lost commuting. It could also mean that kids require less paid care, or that parents can work while also, say, throwing in a load of laundry. The earliest days of remote work might have changed workplace culture in subtler ways, too.

“Kids just became more visible during covid,” said Chloe Quail, a government attorney and mother of two in Sacramento. Seeing co-workers’ children occasionally pop up on Zoom calls helped normalize the idea that employees have responsibilities beyond the office and can’t be on call 24/7, she said. “We didn’t have to have this facade of not being parents. I could say, like, ‘Oh, remember my kid that came into my meeting weeks ago? Well, that kid’s sick, so I have to run.’”

But the rise in employment among college-educated women long predates the pandemic, which means covid-era Zoom culture can’t be the only driver of change. Some of the shift seems to be about evolving social norms and family structures — and households feeling unable to get by on only a man’s income.

In interviews, many college-educated moms around the country say they never seriously considered being stay-at-home parents, because they couldn’t afford to be.

“I have bills to pay,” said Rossana Roberts, a single mother to a toddler in Durham, N.C., where she works in public health. “I have student loan debt, and I have to provide for my son.”

Even mothers with a working spouse spoke of their need to contribute financially to their households. Several raised the fear of suffering the long-term penalties their mothers’ generation endured if they took time out of the workforce.

“I studied economics in college, and I’ll never forget my professor telling us that women earn 80 cents on the dollar of the average man, but in their lifetimes, they will only earn like half of what the average man makes because of all the stop-outs and the lost promotions,” said Natalie Bold, an account manager and mother in Davis, Calif.

Bold said she had once promised herself to not let that career penalty befall her. Rather than leaving the workforce entirely, she decided to temporarily go part-time while her daughter, now 2, is young. Bold sometimes wonders about the long-term financial consequences of that decision, too, she told me.

Another key driver of women’s greater attachment to the labor force might be a stronger sense of personal or intellectual fulfillment through their jobs.

Thanks to legal victories, changing norms and more diverse role models, women today have many more occupational choices than earlier generations did. This is especially true for women with more education. Perhaps this means working women today, relative to their mothers’ or grandmothers’ generations, are more likely to sort into careers they actually enjoy.

When Erin Leigh, a mom of two in South Windsor, Conn., had to take a week off from work this summer because her child care was closed and school hadn’t yet started, it reinforced how exhausting it is to be a full-time caregiver — and how much she likes her job at a nearby university. She loves being a mother, she says, but: “At some point, I just can’t color any more pages, and I can’t hand out any more snacks. I have to go back to work.”

Sara Yin, a mom of two who works for a tech company in the Bay Area, expressed similar reservations when asked whether she ever considered leaving the workforce entirely. She’d miss “adult conversations” if she left her job, she said, adding that “being a full-time mom is so hard and so physically and emotionally exhausting. Lots of colleagues, moms that I talk to, feel like going to work is more like a weekend for us.”

Another factor slowly, belatedly enabling workforce gains for American women: American men.

There’s some evidence that fathers are taking on greater responsibilities at home, which might help more mothers remain employed, especially while their kids are young. This is likely a function of both evolving gender norms and a more accommodating work culture. Americans of both sexes have more egalitarian attitudes toward child-rearing than in generations past, but acting on those attitudes requires employer support, too.

“The best way to help moms is to give husbands more flexibility in their schedule and more parental leave,” said Yin, the tech company employee. “There is just so much more dialogue around ‘mom guilt’ and how to try to overcome it, but there’s so little about ‘dad guilt.’”

Managers appear to be getting more understanding about family responsibilities. Access to paid family leave has been rising over time, especially for higher-paid and white-collar workers, as more states have mandated it and more employers see it as necessary to retain staff. Perhaps more important, men seem increasingly willing to take advantage of their leave benefits, as corporate culture shifts and more high-profile men model taking time off. Last month, the number of workers on parental leave reached an all-time high, primarily because of increases in leave-taking among fathers.

Many of the women I interviewed spoke of having frank discussions with their spouses or co-parents, sometimes aided by popular books or exercises, about the household division of labor.

“When the day care is closed, usually [my husband] will take the day off,” said Alissa Tyghter-Gerald, who works for a housing nonprofit in New York. “That was definitely a discussion between us. I told him, ‘It can’t always be me.’”

Both spouses’ ability to actively co-parent has been enabled by working for understanding employers, she noted, something the two haven’t always enjoyed. “You have to have the right conditions, you know, and all the things have to fall into place,” she said, for demanding professional and caregiving responsibilities to feel “sustainable.”

If there’s a takeaway from the recent employment milestones achieved by working women, and especially college-educated moms, it’s this: A lot of factors needed to align perfectly for this to happen. Women had to invest in the right skills and credentials to get into just the right occupations. They also required more supportive partners and co-parents, plus available child care and maybe backup child-care arrangements, too. And they needed more accommodating employers — or at least economic conditions that forced employers to become more accommodating, because companies short on staff need to keep their workers happy.

Which underscores the question of whether such strong growth in women’s employment is itself sustainable, absent a tight labor market or different policy choices. After all, the job market is softening. At some point, employers might consider workers — especially those seeking nontraditional schedules or other flexible arrangements — more expendable, and so might be less willing to accede to their demands on when and how they work. And expanded federal funding for child care recently ended, stressing the caregiving system for providers and parents alike.

So far, 2023 has been a banner year for working women, well beyond Taylor and Beyoncé and Barbie; it’s the millions of rank-and-file white-collar moms who’ve been fueling our economic expansion. Whether their gains will last into 2024 and beyond is less clear.