Our current caregiving crisis is the inevitable outcome of an outdated ideology that has resulted in insufficient investments in our care infrastructure and in our people.
Pre-pandemic, child care provider Flora Montes-Moreno had 11 clients now she’s down to one who attends regularly. (Hyoung Chang / Getty Images)
The COVID-19 pandemic “is the most discriminatory crisis we [women and girls] have ever experienced,” Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, executive director of U.N. Women, said at the opening of the 65th Commission on the Status of Women in early March.
Her statement rings just as true in the U.S. as elsewhere in the world. Since the start of the pandemic a little more than a year ago, American women have lost a net total of 5.4 million jobs 1 million more than men and by the end of February nearly 3 million women had left the workforce entirely, many of them to care for their families.