After years of progress, and plenty of hard-won lessons from the pandemic, women, especially mothers of young children, are leaving the workforce in alarming numbers. The data and the stories are very real, and the consequences ripple far beyond individual families.
Let’s dig into what’s really happening and what organizations can do right now to interrupt this trend before it becomes a further crisis of equity, talent, and trust.
What the Data Is Telling Us
Recent reporting from PBS NewsHour, KPMG, and Forbes reveals a troubling but familiar pattern: women are being pushed out of the workforce, not because they want to leave, but because the systems weren’t built to help them stay.
- The PBS NewsHour segment highlights the lived experience behind the data. Mothers with young children are making the difficult decision to leave jobs, not due to lack of ambition, but because the logistics have become untenable. Return-to-office mandates, unreliable childcare, and a lack of support for caregiving responsibilities are forcing women to make choices they shouldn’t have to make.
- The KPMG analysis backs this up with hard numbers, showing a sharp decline in labor force participation among women with young children, particularly those with college degrees, even as men in the same category are increasing their participation. They call this shift The Great Exit, and ties it directly to rising childcare costs, inflexible return-to-office policies, and cultural resistance to caregiving accommodations.
- Meanwhile, a viral statistic about Black women leaving the workforce sparked debate. In Forbes, Richard Fowler urges a more nuanced view: while the headline may have oversimplified the data, the structural inequities facing Black women in the labor market are very real. Disproportionate job losses, lack of support, and chronic underinvestment in the communities they serve are all part of the story.
Put simply: the exits aren’t just personal. They’re systemic, and absolutely preventable.
What’s Driving This?
This trend is the result of a system that still expects people to work as if they don’t have caregiving responsibilities, and to care as if they don’t have jobs.
Among the top reasons:
- Childcare is fragile, expensive, and inaccessible. KPMG notes that even modest increases in childcare costs can tip families over the edge, particularly for middle-income and hourly workers. In an economy that’s increasingly untenable for many, the first step may often be for women to sacrifice their careers for childcare.
- Return-to-office mandates are colliding with caregiving realities. As PBS reports, many of the mothers who stayed in or rejoined the workforce during the pandemic were only able to do so because of remote and flexible work. Those gains are now being erased.
- Workplace culture often penalizes flexibility, even when it’s “allowed.” There’s a difference between offering flexibility and actually supporting it. If taking advantage of a flexible policy leads to missed promotions or side-eye from leadership, it’s not really a benefit.
- Career growth still depends heavily on visibility and traditional availability. KPMG calls this the “face-time tax” and it’s costing companies talent they can’t afford to lose.
- Mental load and burnout are chronic and gendered. The PBS story highlights how, for many mothers, the breaking point isn’t one big thing. It’s the drip-drip-drip of invisible labor and impossible tradeoffs.
So what do we do about it?
This is where inclusive leadership becomes real, not rhetorical. Leaders, managers, and employees in any position of power need to support the design of systems, roles, and expectations that actually work for everyone.
Here’s where we’d focus:
1. Rethink Flexibility
Offer flexible-by-design roles, not one-off accommodations. Normalize hybrid, remote, compressed weeks, and asynchronous work where possible. Train managers to lead with trust, not time-tracking.
2. Center Care in Culture
Care isn’t an individual issue, it’s an issue we all will likely connect with at some point in our lives. Recognize and name caregiving in conversations about benefits, burnout, and performance expectations. Build policies that anticipate disruption, rather than punish it.
3. Redesign Performance Metrics
It’s time to shift rewarding presence over progress. Align success metrics to actual impact and output. This benefits everyone, not just caregivers, and leads to better equity across the board.
4. Support Re-entry
Leaving the workforce isn’t always a choice. Make it easier to return. Create “returnships,” ramp-back options, and clear pathways for reintegration. Ensure people aren’t starting over just because they stepped out.
5. Collect & Disaggregate Your Data
Look at who’s leaving and why. Break it down by gender, race, parent status, role type. If your systems aren’t tracking this, they’re not serving you. The leaks in the pipeline won’t fix themselves.
This Isn’t Just a Women’s Issue. It’s a Workplace Issue.
Let’s be clear: this issue isn’t about women “opting out,” but rather about workplaces, many under real economic strain, struggling to adapt fast enough to retain the people they’ve worked so hard to hire and develop.
Budgets are tightening, teams are leaner, and everyone is being asked to do more with less. But in these moments, especially in these moments, inclusion isn’t something to cut back on, but rather it’s something to build resilience around.
Organizations that treat flexibility and caregiving support as “extras” will lose the very people who hold institutional knowledge, drive team culture, and often carry the invisible load that keeps work moving. The ones that invest wisely, even incrementally, in inclusive systems will retain loyalty, talent, and long-term capability.
We know that inclusion isn’t static and it isn’t easy, especially when times are tough. But moments like this are exactly why we do the work.
If you’re a leader reading this, we invite you to pause and ask:
- Who’s quietly stepping back in your organization?
- What’s making it hard for them to stay?
- And what might change if you treated inclusion not as an initiative — but as a design principle?
Want to Go Deeper?
We help organizations redesign systems with inclusion, flexibility, and retention in mind. Whether it’s reimagining performance evaluations, supporting caregivers, or shifting your culture from reactive to responsive, we’re here.
Contact us to learn more, or explore our offerings on building future-ready, inclusive workplaces that people want to stay in.