Enough working mothers have exited the U.S. workforce in 2025 to reverse gains made after the pandemic, The Washington Post reported Aug. 11.
The share of women in the labor force who are age 25 to 44 and living with children younger than 5 fell nearly three percentage points from January to June — the lowest level in more than three years, according to federal data analyzed by Misty Heggeness, PhD, a professor at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
As of June, 67% of women with young children were working or looking for work, down from nearly 71% in June 2023.
Many mothers reentered the workforce after the pandemic amid an expansion of remote and flexible work. Return-to-office mandates and federal layoffs have reversed that trend, the Post reported.
Since January, about 212,000 women older than 20 have stopped working or seeking employment. The unemployment rate — 4.2% — is low, but overall labor force participation among women has declined in 2025.
“The U.S. is the only advanced economy that’s had declining female labor force participation in the last 20 years, and a lot of that is because of lack of social safety net and caregiving supports,” Kate Bahn, PhD, chief economist at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, told the Post. “It’s a long-term trend that appears to be getting worse.”
In healthcare, women remain more represented than in other industries, but those figures did not meaningfully change between 2020 and 2024, according to McKinsey’s “Women in the Workplace” report. Representation was essentially flat across career stages, from entry level to the C-suite.
Promotion rates for women in healthcare did not improve in 2024 and attrition rates worsened, the report found.
A Gallup study conducted from February 2023 to October 2024 also found stress weighs more heavily on working women. More than half said they felt stress “a lot of the day yesterday,” compared to 39% of men.
