Why mothers are leaving the workforce
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More women are leaving the workforce, pushed out by a lack of child care support and stricter return-to-office policies, a new analysis from KPMG finds.
Why it matters: The exodus translates to less income and financial stability for households, as well as fewer career growth opportunities for women.
- There's fallout for the overall economy, too: Businesses lose productive and experienced workers, and growth slows.
Where it stands: The departures started after pandemic-era supports for child care lapsed in 2023.
- Now, the exodus appears to be accelerating as the job market weakens and federal job cuts and policy moves take a disproportionate toll on working women.
By the numbers: College-educated mothers with very young children are seeing the biggest declines.
- The percentage of these women in the labor force fell to 77% in August 2025, from a high near 80% in 2023, according to KPMG's analysis of Census data.
- The next group to see drops: women with young kids without a bachelor's degree, whose labor force participation declined by about 1 percentage point.
- Fathers, both with and without a bachelor's degree, with very young kids had slight increases in labor force participation over the same period.
Reality check: Labor force participation for women in still higher than pre-pandemic levels, though the trajectory is down.
The big picture: There's a shortage of child care workers in the U.S. While employment in the sector cratered at the start of the pandemic, it had been climbing up steadily with federal funding through the fall of 2023.
- When funding ended that year, many warned of a "child care cliff" — a drastic drop in workers in the sector and closures of day care centers.
- Instead what happened was more of a plateau, says Matthew Nestler, a senior economist at KPMG who wrote the report.
Zoom in: Child care employment flatlined. The industry is now about 100,000 workers short of where it would be had funding supports continued, his analysis finds.
- That's driven up costs — child care prices have increased at about twice the rate of overall inflation — and led to shortages in some areas.
How it works: When child care is too pricey or unavailable, mothers typically leave paying jobs to stay home.
- That's become even more likely now, as companies increasingly ask employees to work in the office — even on hybrid schedules.
- For working parents with tightly choreographed child care schedules, it's a challenge. "Facing these sudden shifts, one parent, disproportionately the mother, reduces work hours or leaves the labor force entirely," Nestler wrote.
Between the lines: Amid these changes, there's been a big shift in rhetoric about women from corners of the right and the White House, as Jessica Grose of the New York Times noted this week.
- The White House wants to cut funding for the Women's Bureau, part of the Labor Department that has specifically studied women's employment.
- Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is looking to limit women's role in the military.
- And the administration has taken a hatchet to agencies where women hold the majority of positions, like the Department of Education.
Amid a crackdown on diversity, some private companies have stopped tracking stats — so it's harder to see what's happening. We do know the gender wage gap has widened for two years running, per recent Census data.
What to watch: The child care situation is likely to worsen with the White House crackdown on immigration – about 21% of child care workers nationwide are immigrants, though in some states, including New York and California, the percentage is far higher.
The bottom line: After a few years of progress, working women are moving backward.
Editor's note: This story has been corrected to say the report author Matthew Nestler is a senior economist at KPMG (not PwC).
