We stopped caring about women at work

Some of my favorite stories at TIME have been about how it’s a problem that men run just about everything. There was the time I tried to shop only at women-owned businesses and found it impossible, my story about the secretive medical group that appears to have decided that procedures for and by women should cost less, and my essay about how the pandemic’s remote work policies enabled women to work and parent with less friction than in the past. My latest story is in this vein:

Why So Many Women Are Quitting the Workforce

I have been keeping an eye on women’s labor-force participation, which is the share of women in the population at work or looking for work. And after rising during the pandemic, it appears to have peaked in January 2025 and started falling again. One researcher found that labor force participation of women ages 25-44 living with a child under five fell a whopping three percentage points from January 2025 to June.

What’s going on here? The most obvious thing to me is the return to office policies being pushed by everyone from the federal government to Starbucks to JP Morgan. All places, by the way, run by men. One of the experts I talked to had thoughts about this: “When I hear about these companies making everyone go back to the office, the most normal situation is it’s being ordered by some old white male person with what I call care privilege, which is that they have someone who cooks their meals, irons their clothes, or picks their kids up from daycare,” she told me.

I don’t really understand why more people aren’t calling these old white male persons on this. I actually looked for lawsuits arguing that RTO policies are discriminatory against women and disabled people, but didn’t find any. But RTO policies do not appear to be a hill that modern feminism seems to want to die on, perhaps because they benefit upper and middle-income women more than others.

Still, it’s a reality that many families who moved during the pandemic because of cost of living or family issues are being faced with the difficult choice of either moving back to the place that didn’t really work for them, or having one parent quit their job. And it seems to be usually the woman who quits, whether it be because women get paid less so their salaries are more dispensable, or because women more traditionally take on caregiving responsibilities.

I admire the companies that are standing up and saying people can work from wherever, as long as they get their work done, but they are sadly the minority. Only about 9% of job postings on LinkedIn are remote job listings, but 38% of applicants were for remote jobs.

One thing to keep an eye on in this story is how families fare once one parent drops out of the workforce. Things are expensive these days, and I’ve talked to a good share of families who say it’s a struggle to survive on one income, even if the working partner has a good job. That means more families limping along towards retirement, saving less, and spending less.

Once again, you can read the story here: Why So Many Women Are Quitting the Workforce

A little side note: I was commiserating with a journalism colleague at another publication the other day about how hard it is to get stories out to the general public. It’s especially difficult because of the demise / radicalization of Twitter, which used to be a pretty reliable place to share content. So when this story didn’t take off on the web as much as I wanted, I went to Reddit and posted a link to it in one of my favorite communities, R/TwoXChromosomes . According to Reddit, that post got 298k views, which is much, much, MUCH more than it got at TIME. I don’t think many people actually clicked on the link, more just engaged in the discussion below the story, but it just goes to show the many jobs that journalists have today — reporter, editor, fact checker, social media promoter. Have ideas for how to get my stories read by more people? Let me know!

And if you like the ‘bosses stink now’ storyline, check out my 2023 story, No More Mr. Nice Boss (as I called it), or, as TIME called it, Flexible and Empathetic Employers Were a Pandemic Blip

Books to Fall Asleep To

I am listening to a book called Save Our Souls, about a family of five with bad luck who were hired in the 1880s to take a ship on a shark-fishing expedition in the Pacific. Their boat was then wrecked in a storm and they got stranded on a desert island. It’s billed as a real-life Swiss Family Robinson. Apparently they are not alone on the desert island — some guy called Hans had been stranded there previously and greets them. I keep falling asleep during the Hans parts (not because they are boring, because I am tired!) but I am heralding a guess that if you get stranded on a desert island and there’s already some guy named Hans there, he is bad news.