Why So Many Women Are Quitting the Workforce

Time​ Magazine

2 days ago

It's a stark number: 212,000. That's how many women ages 20 and over have left the workforce since January, according to the most recent jobs numbers released Aug. 1 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (By contrast, 44,000 men have entered the workforce since January.) The numbers show a reversal of recent trends that saw more women, especially women with children, finding and keeping full-time jobs.
Data show that between January and June, labor force participation rate of women ages 25 to 44 living with a child under five fell nearly three percentage points, from 69.7% to 66.9%, says Misty Lee Heggeness, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Kansas. It's a big reversal. The participation of those women had soared in 2022, 2023, and 2024, peaking in January 2025, as flexible work policies helped women join the workforce and generate much-needed income for their families.
Workers have seen flexibility revoked in 2025 on a large scale. President Donald Trump ordered federal employees back to the office five days a week in January, though many had negotiated remote work arrangements and some had even moved far away from their offices. Amazon, JP Morgan, and AT&T also returned to five days a week policies in 2025. Overall, full-time in-office requirements among Fortune 500 companies jumped to 24% in the second quarter of 2025, up from 13% in the end of 2024, according to the Flex Index, which tracks remote work policies.
This has hit women with a bachelor's degree in particular; their labor-force participation rate, which had been falling for decades before the pandemic, started ticking up again in 2020, peaking at 70.3% in September in 2024. It's been falling ever since, and stood at 67.7% in July 2025, according to the most recent jobs report.
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It's not a coincidence that women's participation in the workforce is falling as flexibility disappears, says Julie Vogtman, senior director of job quality for the National Women's Law Center. Women capitalized on remote work and flexibility during the pandemic and stopped exiting the labor force, research shows. Now, many are not able to do so.
'Women still take on the lion's share of caregiving responsibilities, and they are more likely than men to be navigating how to meet those caregiving responsibilities while holding down a job,' she says. 'They are also more likely than men to feel that they have to leave the workforce when their balancing act becomes unmanageable.'
Return-to-office policies are not proven to make companies more productive. One 2024 study of resumes at Microsoft, SpaceX, and Apple found that return-to-office policies led to an exodus of senior employees, which posed a potential threat to competitiveness of the larger firm. And nearly two-thirds of C-suite executives said that return-to-work mandates caused a 'disproportionate number' of females to quit, according to a 2024 survey conducted by Walr, a data-collection agency, on behalf of Upwork and Workplace Intelligence. Many of those CEOs who reported women quitting said they were struggling to fill jobs because of that loss of female employees and that their overall workforce productivity is down.
'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,' says Heggeness.
Read More: Trump's Return-to-Office Push Is a Mistake
The disappearance of flexibility is not the only reason women are leaving the workforce in 2025. Some of the decline in participation comes from lower-income women in jobs that have historically had to be done in person full-time, even during the pandemic. Those women are struggling because federal dollars for childcare have declined significantly in 2025. That money helped many centers stay open and charge lower tuition than they otherwise would have. That funding ended in September 2024, forcing many centers to close or raise tuition, leaving some families without options.
What's more, the mass deportations occurring throughout the country now are affecting childcare providers, about 20% of whom are immigrants, according to Vogtman. Even if workers have legal status, some may be afraid to come to work, and others may have lost their own childcare and have to stay home as a result, she says. The federal funding helped some providers keep their costs down; now, childcare expenses are rising again. The amount of money American families spent on nursery, elementary, and secondary schools fell in much of 2023 and 2024, and then started to rise again in the fourth quarter of 2024, when it jumped 3.3%, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. It has risen every quarter in 2025..
'You have a population of working women who are finding it increasingly difficult to make the math work,' Vogtman says.
Those include many federal government workers, who may have been drawn to their jobs because government jobs were long seen as flexible, with good benefits like parental leave, says Heggeness. Research suggests that women are more likely to take a lower-paying job if there are benefits attached like telework and flexibility around timing their schedule, she says. If those jobs then experience massive layoffs—as federal workers have under Trump's downsizing—women could be disproportionately affected.
As women leave the workforce, the Trump Administration is exploring ways to encourage women to get married and have more children in order to slow the country's decline in birth rate. But Heggeness suspects that forcing federal government workers back to the office makes many women choose between having children and pursuing their careers—and many might choose the latter.
'What they are doing right now, with the return-to-work policies and their leading by example, is the exact opposite of what you'd want to be doing from a policy perspective if you really care about increasing birth rates,' Heggeness says.
Of course, for some women, leaving the workforce can be a blessing, if their partners have stable jobs that provide a good income. They have more time to spend with their families, and some are freelancing or starting their own businesses.
Sarah Wedge moved out of Philadelphia during the pandemic; her employment ended when her company called employees back to the office, she says, and she decided she didn't want to move her family back. Now, she's freelancing and spending more time with her three-year-old daughter. 'I'm a mom, and that's part of why I've enjoyed freelancing; it's the whole fluid schedule that's great,' she says.
But there are reasons to be concerned about women leaving the workforce. Without two salaries, many families struggle to afford basics like housing, food, and transportation; they have less money to spend, which means less money circulating in the economy. Their health care and other benefits are more precarious in an economy where only one partner works. Economic growth has slowed in the first half of the year; in the long term, slowing growth worsens people's standard of living.
For many women, this is more than an economic problem: it's a depressing reminder that the brief period of time when work-from-home reigned—when balancing family and work was actually sometimes possible—is over.
Read More: Flexible Employers Were a Pandemic Blip
Big picture, women's labor-force participation has stalled in the U.S. in recent decades, peaking in the early 2000s even as it rose in many countries in Europe. But then, during the pandemic, rates started rising again, as women could handle childcare pickup and dropoff and other caregiving responsibilities while working from home. Among married women, rates rose from 56.9% in Jan. 2021 to 59% in Jan. 2024.
'What is most heartbreaking about all of this is that the pandemic felt like this revolution, where they finally realized we're human beings and they'll treat us with some degree of respect,' says a mother of two whose company went back to mandating three in-office workdays, but which granted her a temporary exception, meaning she is still able to work remotely full time. 'In the pandemic, they were saying, 'We care about you as people, and we understand that your well-being contributes to your productivity at work,'' she says.
The mother, who does not want her name used because she doesn't want to risk her remote status, has two young children and moved to be closer to their grandparents during the pandemic. Now, she's just waiting for her company to end her employment by reversing her remote work status, which the company says can be revoked at any time for any reason. She's not willing to pick up her family and move back, but she wishes she didn't have to choose.
'There's been a shift in the zeitgeist—now, it's 'We don't care about you, and you're replaceable,'' she says. 'It's like we didn't learn anything.'