The Indicator from Planet Money

Episode•September 5, 2025•10 min

Why moms are leaving their paid jobs

Moms are quitting — or getting pushed out. Workforce participation for mothers in the U.S. has been dropping for most of this year, and the reasons are more complicated than return-to-office mandates. Today on the show, we talk to moms about why they left their jobs and to economist Misty Heggeness (https://www.ucpress.edu/books/swiftynomics/hardcover), who has studied the phenomenon. Find more of Misty’s research here (https://thecareboard.ku.edu/labor-force-participation-tracker-parents-children-under-5). Related episodes: How insurance is affecting the cost of childcare (https://www.npr.org/2024/07/29/1197967900/how-insurance-is-affecting-the-cost-of-childcare) Women, work and the pandemic (https://www.npr.org/2021/06/09/1004892039/women-work-and-the-pandemic) That time America paid for universal daycare (https://www.npr.org/2021/06/30/1011968802/that-time-america-paid-for-universal-daycare) For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org (http://plus.npr.org/). Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez (https://www.npr.org/people/1268825622/sierra-juarez). Music by Drop Electric (https://dropelectric.bandcamp.com/). Find us: TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@planetmoney), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/planetmoney/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/planetmoney), Newsletter (https://www.npr.org/newsletter/money). To manage podcast ad preferences, review the links below: See pcm.adswizz.com (https://pcm.adswizz.com) for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices (https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices) NPR Privacy Policy (https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy)

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Transcript

0:01

Npr.

0:11

This is the Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darian Woods.

0:14

I'm Waylon Wong. And it is jobs Friday, that day of the month when we get fresh data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on how workers are doing. Today's numbers were a little lackluster. They show that the economy added 22,000 jobs in August, which is below expectation. The unemployment rate ticked up just a bit to 4.3%. It's the highest rate in four years.

0:38

The data suggests that the overall labour market is in this holding pattern. We're not seeing a lot of new jobs, but we're not seeing a big exodus of workers either. Beneath the surface though, there are groups of people who are leaving the workforce and one of those groups is mothers.

0:56

Here in the indicator, we love hearing from listeners. So we reached out to Working Moms and we heard from a bunch of you. Today the show we hear some of those stories about why they've scaled back their work lives. And an economist explains what the state of working moms tells us about the health of the broader labor market.

1:16

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1:45

Nicole Damstetter lives in Orlando, Florida with her husband, their four year old daughter, two dogs, a cat and five chickens.

1:53

You've got your own eggs, right? So you're like making money in this economy. It's great.

1:56

It's great. I use them to barter with the neighbors.

1:59

Nicole spent roughly the last decade in the tech sector helping nonprofit organizations use software and, and she says she had always defined herself by her job. But that began to change when her daughter started part time preschool.

2:13

She was really coming alive and getting this personality being at preschool. And then I started to think ahead and realized I've only got a little time left before she starts real, you know, big kids school, as we call it, kindergarten. And I don't want to miss this and this is the time that I'm not gonna get back. And I really reflected that I wanted to be home with my daughter.

2:40

This is a story you hear a lot. So Nicole left her job. It was a change that her daughter was excited about too.

2:47

We made a calendar to have her count down the days to what she was calling mommy all the time days. And I have been really just jumping into deep play with my daughter instead of deep work.

3:00

Deep play.

3:00

Love it. Some elaborate role playing games. She comes up with lots of interactions in the dollhouse and it's been wonderful.

3:09

Nicole quit her job in April. And she wasn't the only mom who left their job this year. In the first half of 2025, the percentage of moms in the labor force fell from around 70% to 67%.

3:23

These numbers come from economist Misty Haganess. She's a professor at the University of Kansas and the author of a forthcoming book called Swiftinomics How Women Mastermind and Redef. And yes, that's swifty, as in Taylor Swift.

3:37

Where were you when the engagement news happened?

3:42

I was in my car and just about to start my car and I got a text from one of my graduate students who said Taylor and Travis are engaged. I'll probably never forget that moment.

3:54

Me neither. Producer Corey Bridges was the one who told me I'm in a work zoo.

3:58

Always the best for breaking pop culture news.

4:00

Oh yes. Misty has been tracking what's been going on with working moms. And by the way, moms here means women ages 25 to 44 with children under 5.

4:09

Okay, so not all moms.

4:11

And to zoom out a little, Misty says that during the pandemic these moms are working more than ever and getting paid for it. Their labor force participation rate hit an all time high of 71% in 2023.

4:23

Misty attributes that growth to policies that let mothers with certain jobs work from home or have flexible schedules to those gains have started reversing this year. That's where we see the drop in labour participation from 70% to 67%. It recovered slightly in July but is still below its peak.

4:44

What we're seeing now is, you know, a couple years out from the pandemic, some of the larger employers in the federal government have really pushed on this idea of return to office. And I think it's had an unintended consequence on caregivers ability to work. And we see that in the data.

5:02

In other cases, even when employers are flexible, it still doesn't work out. That was what happened with Ivy Abed. Her background is in science education and she had been working full time at Chicago Public Schools, organizing career fairs and helping high school students get internships. Ivy is also a mom to a

5:20

two year old daughter and she's wonderful. In the light of my life.

5:24

Ivy's Daughter has a condition that required a lot of hospital stays during the first year of her life. The things stabilized after a recent surgery, but Ivy's mother also started having memory problems. Ivy and her husband moved her mother from Alaska to Chicago.

5:40

Ivy and her supervisors tried to work out a part time arrangement, but she needed even more flexibility than what her school could offer. So she traded her full time job for a part time role teaching biology at a community college.

5:53

I think we would have been able to make it work if it had just been my daughter's condition. But because I had this added variable of my mother having her own separate trajectory, which was much less predictable, it just made sense that I would just need flexibility. And so I had to switch to something part time where that's a little more of an option.

6:16

Ivy says she's happy with her new work life balance. She's gotten to spend more time with her daughter and her mother. She's even found time for hobbies like bike riding. The downside is the hit to her income.

6:28

Taking the pay cut is the hardest part, both in terms of sort of like my sense of self and what I'm contributing to our family unit, and also a little bit of frustration about, like, how I feel like my, my time and my credentials are valued. I'm doing the same kind of work that would be earning $45 or $50 an hour if I were a full time employee. But as a part time employee, in order to get that flexibility, I have to take a few, you know, get paid half as much.

6:59

Other moms are leaving or getting pushed out of the workforce altogether. Economist Misty Haganess says two groups are important to watch. Moms of young children and black moms. They're among the most sensitive to changes in the broader economy.

7:12

Black women especially tend to be overrepresented in jobs with lower pay and less security. And it takes them, on average longer to find work after being unemployed. Their unemployment rate has been higher and increasing faster than the overall jobless rate. It was 6.7% in August compared to 4.3% overall.

7:33

So these moms with kids under five is definitely like a canary in the coal mine sort of situation. They lead the trends in terms of how strong our labor market is, how weak it might be. You know, they're the ones that will be first to get pushed out. For example, Looking at black moms is also a really good indicator of, you know, whether or not our economy and the job market is generally doing well and healthy or not.

8:03

Misty also points out that behind these Headline numbers on employment and labor force participation is a whole range of experiences. There are moms like Nicole who left the workforce on her own terms, and moms like Ivy who have taken a pay cut in exchange for some needed flexibility.

8:20

A common thread in the stories we heard is that some mums are rethinking their relationship with work. That was the case with Rosie Nestingen. She lives with her husband and their two and a half year old daughter in Minneapolis.

8:32

And Rosie has had a winding path in and out of the labor force. She used to have a high stress corporate job focused on equity in the workplace.

8:39

Forty days into my maternity leave, I got laid off.

8:43

She took a year off to be with her daughter and then started a new job as a consultant. That got interrupted by some health issues. And after she recovered, she decided to go back to work on a limited schedule.

8:54

Rosie says her professional and personal experiences changed the way she thinks about her career. She's trying to model a different approach for her daughter when it comes to work.

9:04

The conversations are like, how are we making life better for women? How are we making life better for people of color? Like, I really try to situate myself in spaces where those things exist and are true and that I'm not. Honestly, I'm not the black person in the room that has to tell you why you should care about diversity. Like, I can't do that anymore.

9:22

These conversations are what economist Misty Haganas said should be happening among employers and policymakers. She hopes those conversations will lead to efforts on affordable childcare and workplace flexibility. And that, she says, will help keep moms in the workforce. This episode was produced by Julia Ritchie with engineering by Robert Rodriguez. It was fact checked by Sarah Juarez. Kit Concannon is our editor, and the indicator is a production of npr.

9:50

Sorry, I can't say moms. I just cannot.

9:51

Oh, oh, really? Okay, that's fine.

9:54

I just can't.

9:56

I can say mums. I can say mums.

Why moms are leaving their paid jobs

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