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I was just reading this article about why childcare needs to be a business issue. It’s got all the common stats we’ve been seeing since COVID began to rage, including:
- 20% of working parents had to leave work or reduce their work hours solely due to a lack of childcare.
- Only 30% of all working parents had any form of back-up childcare, and there were significant disparities between low and high-income households.
- 26% of women who became unemployed during the pandemic said it was due to a lack of childcare.
- Data shows that the United States’ gross domestic product could be 5% higher if women participated in the workforce at the same rate as men.
- More than 2.3 million women have left the labor force since February 2020, accounting for 80% of all discouraged workers during the pandemic, reducing the labor force participate rate to 57%, the lowest it’s been since 1988.
- Even before the pandemic, inadequate childcare was costing working parents $37 billion a year in lost income and employers $13 billion a year in lost productivity.
- Barron’s estimated that closing schools for Covid-19 could cost about $700 billion in lost revenue and productivity or 3.5% of GDP.
