The pandemic knocked millions of people out of the workforce, and reopening schools helped one group in particular return to their jobs.
“K-12 reopenings are associated with significant increases in employment and hours among married women with school-aged children, with no measurable effects on labor supply in comparison groups,” the researchers wrote. “Students going back to classrooms had no significant effect on the number of hours worked by single mothers, women with no children, — or married fathers.”
The researchers faced a challenge in gathering their data because schools across the country reopened at different times, and schools had different policies about whether students attended class in-person. The researchers used mobile-phone data from SafeGraph, a consumer tracking company, to measure foot traffic at K-12 schools as a proxy for local school reopenings.
“How large are these impacts? At the peak of the COVID-19 recession, married women with school-aged kids saw their employment drop by 15 percentage points. Therefore a 3.2 percentage point increase would represent 21% of the gains in employment seen by those women since the pandemic began,” the researchers wrote.
What does the news mean for your wallet? Sign up for our Personal Finance Daily newsletter to find out.The high cost of childcare, inflexible jobs, and a “lack of policy support for working parents” are among the possible explanations for that stagnation, the paper authors wrote.
That makes no sense at all. Mothers and wives aren’t the same.
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