Some Companies Pay More for Doggy Day Care Than They Do for Childcare

Childcare in the US is broken. Half-measures from employers won’t cut it — here’s what will.

The early days of the pandemic were terrible for all American workers — but the job losses that followed had a truly catastrophic impact on women. “Thirty years of progress in women’s workforce participation were wiped out basically in nine months,” author Reshma Saujani said in a recent episode of “ Pitchfork Economics.”

Saujani rose to national prominence as the founder of the nonprofit Girls Who Code, which is dedicated to closing the gender pay gap in Big Tech by empowering and educating young women to be programmers. As a response to the gender inequities that were worsened by the pandemic, she founded the Marshall Plan for Moms to establish and advocate for pay equity for mothers in the American workforce and change longstanding cultural expectations in order to “make workplaces work for women,” as Saujani put it.

There are several reasons why women suffered the economic brunt of the early-pandemic jobs collapse. First, women in America make up the majority of low-wage workforces that were hit particularly hard by early lockdowns, such as education and leisure and hospitality. But childcare is one of the biggest reasons why the lockdowns were economically disastrous for women: Schools were closed, children were home, and millions of women — who performed 114 more additional hours of…