Kerry Donovan, a trial lawyer, had such a demanding career that she wasn’t sure about having children. The pandemic changed her calculus.
Her hours remained long and unpredictable. She was the breadwinner. She moved across the country to help care for her parents after her father had a stroke. Yet despite all this, having children suddenly seemed possible — because of the way pandemic-era work untethered office workers from the office.
She now has two children, ages 4 and 2. She still goes to the office several days a week. But the ability to work from home has made it possible to have both a career and a family, she said.
Equally important has been a cultural change at work. “What the pandemic did was people all of a sudden were talking more about their families — ‘I have small kids’ or ‘I have a parent who’s sick’ — and it made everything easier,” she said. “The pandemic is the main thing that has enabled me to remain in this job.”
For people whose jobs can be done at different places and times — mostly college-educated office workers — a lasting effect of the pandemic has been a newfound flexibility, which had been hard to find in the increasingly demanding American workplace. Today, 26 percent of parents still work remotely some days of the week. And like Ms. Donovan, workers describe a new attitude at the office about family, as something to be accommodated, not hidden.
But after six years of this natural experiment, American workplace culture seems to be at a crossroads. Some employers are cutting back on benefits that have supported working parents, including remote work. A movement on the right is pushing for more mothers to stay home entirely.
Yet there’s evidence that a more flexible and family-oriented environment has benefited caregivers of all kinds, including fathers, people caring for aging parents, and especially mothers. In interviews, some said they wouldn’t have had children otherwise. Others said they might not have continued to work.
Since 2023, the share of mothers of prime working age who are in the labor force in some capacity and have children 18 and under has consistently been higher than it was in 2019 — which was already a period of very low unemployment, including for mothers.
It’s particularly true of mothers of children under 5, according to data analysis for The New York Times by the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. Economists see these women as a bellwether because they’re most affected by parenting demands and least likely to work.
Mothers are working because they have to: Forty-five percent are their family’s primary earners; wages often aren’t keeping up with expenses; and women suffer long-term career setbacks if they take breaks. They’re also working because they want to: Women are on average more educated than men, they’re having children later, and they’re investing in careers they care about.
But most working parents also say they want more time with their children. While the changes are incremental, the data suggests that workplace flexibility has made it more possible for more of them to do both.
Since the pandemic, mothers have been “quite resilient” in staying in the labor force, said Lauren Bauer, a fellow in economic studies at Brookings who led the analysis.
It also shows, researchers say, that changing the way more jobs operate — including jobs that don’t have as much flexibility in when and where they get done — could help even more workers who are also caregivers (which is pretty much everyone at some point in their lives).
“This is a problem for society to solve,” said Misty L. Heggeness, a professor at the University of Kansas. “We need to start making the work environments outside of our home work for women, work for caregivers.”
Rethinking face time
Many obstacles to working and caregiving remain. Rising child care prices are making it more expensive to work. Women are paid less than men — especially when they become mothers. Though mothers without college degrees are also working more, it’s not necessarily because it’s become easier to balance work and family; it’s because it’s become harder to make ends meet.
Remote work has downsides — entry-level workers learn less from colleagues, for example, they can feel lonely, and work frequently bleeds into home life — but for those who can do it, it has been a great enabler, parents said.
“Women have been demanding generalized workplace accessibility for a long time, and Covid broke that open, especially for better-educated workers,” Ms. Bauer said.
Elizabeth Terhune, 37, recalls the challenges of working with an infant before the pandemic, pumping breast milk at her biology lab. When she had a second baby, while working remotely in the pandemic, she could breastfeed when he was hungry and work flexible hours, while still making leaps in her career.
“The norms had changed by that point so much,” said Ms. Terhune, who lives in Santa Fe, N.M. “It didn’t have to feel like I was choosing between spending time with my small child and working.”
Choosing wasn’t an option, she said — science was too hard a field to re-enter if she took time away, and “I had really put so much time and effort into something that I really felt passionate about.”
Parents often hid their caregiving responsibilities at work, studies have shown. Now, there is more permission for arrangements like working from home when a child is sick, attending a meeting by video instead of traveling to it, or stepping away from work for school pickup.
“I think the cultural shift where everybody becomes more accepting of it is what makes the biggest difference,” said Lauren Goldman, 37, a lawyer at Boies Schiller Flexner in New York and the mother of two children, ages 5 and 2.
She and her husband, also a lawyer, work a lot. Sometimes their jobs require late nights or travel, or their nanny cancels. But before the pandemic, colleagues told her they wouldn’t tell anyone when they had to deal with a child-related issue. Now she can be honest, she said.
Many men feel even more pressure to be always available at work. Yet survey data shows that post-pandemic, more of them are spending more time with their children and seeking flexible hours.
Trivikram Krishnamurthy, 50, who works in tech in Los Altos, Calif., takes turns with his wife, who is in finance, working from home. It enables him to pick up his son, 11, from school, and help his daughter, 14, with her math homework.
Doing that during the workday had once been unimaginable, he said. But now he feels unapologetic about rearranging his calendar so that he’s free for the hour after school.
“There’s this culture that says you shall not take any time off, and I think that part has gotten easier,” he said. “You still have to worry about getting your things done at work, you still have to worry about getting everything done at home, but there are no arbitrary requirements of face time.”
Making motherhood possible
As the birthrate falls in the United States, some women said the new flexibility was what enabled them to become mothers at all.
Christine Mealey, 40, knew that having a baby on her own would be hard. She had her son, now 4, only after getting a fully remote role during the pandemic, doing human resources investigations for a pharmaceutical company in Boston.
Child care is expensive — around $30,000 a year — and when he’s home sick, she can’t work. But working from home while he’s at day care “helps in every aspect of my life,” she said — she can change laundry or run errands, freeing up time when he’s home.
Jobs in corporate America in the run-up to the pandemic had become round-the-clock, disproportionately rewarding people who were always on call. This often meant mothers took lesser jobs so they could be on call at home.
For Ms. Donovan, the lawyer, who is 40 and lives in Asbury Park, N.J., the fear of needing to “back-burner” the career she’d spent 20 years investing in was why she’d questioned having children. Yet the pandemic enabled her to do so while also caring for her parents — and making partner at her firm, Winston Taylor.
Now, depositions can be done virtually, without several days of travel. She works from home a few days a week, saving three hours by not commuting, and being there for dinner and bedtime with her children.
“I know for a fact that if I had to go to the office like I did prepandemic, I would not be in this situation,” she said. “Certainly I would not be happy.”
How work could change for more parents
The United States has long framed work-family balance as a personal problem. But researchers said remote work showed something else: Changing how work functions can make a broader difference.
“Many of the challenges for working parents, and the solutions, are about the structure of work, not people’s individual effort,” said Corinne Low, an associate professor at the Wharton School at Penn.
Employers and policymakers have the power to reshape work for more people, researchers said.
For jobs that can only be done in person at certain hours, for example, predictability in employees’ schedules is vital — to arrange child care and backup plans for emergencies. Hourly workers, though, often don’t have predictability.
What if the corporate American workday were aligned with school hours? What if office workers had certain hours each day when they were expected to work synchronously, and could choose their other hours?
What if part-time work were a right, and didn’t mean losing health insurance or the chance to return to the same career track? What if hourly workers were required to get their schedules well in advance?
What if parents had six months of paid leave after a baby was born? What if child care were paid for by the government — including after school and in the summer — and people who took breaks from employment for caregiving got stipends?
What if school, work and society were built around the expectation that men are caregivers too?
Changes like these have happened before, researchers said. The eight-hour workday wasn’t commonplace until the 1930s. Today’s fathers are doing much more at home than their fathers did. During the pandemic, the federal government subsidized child care and required paid sick leave.
“We need to be bolder in demanding a decent life for parents, for workers,” said Sarah Banet-Weiser, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at Penn. “There’s this idea that nothing can change. But we had this grand experiment in the pandemic, and the economy didn’t fall apart.”
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