With no child care or flexible hours available, too many working mothers feel like they have no choice but to put their careers on the backburner.
One of the hardest days during the pandemic was when Alexis*, a 34-year-old social worker from New York City, had to tell her boss that her mother was dead. Alexis’s mother didn’t die of Covid-19—she had died a few years earlier—but Alexis’s boss was suggesting that, because there was no school or child care available, Alexis (who is a single mother) should ask her mother to watch her two daughters so she could be more available for Zoom calls.
