Harriet Torry

But we have seen a sharp cooling since then.

The labor market has come down from this high, and now people are reporting it's much harder to find a job.

We've seen people perhaps spending longer trying to find a job, and it is just harder if you're on the sidelines to break back in.

We are hearing this a lot.

There are various theories for what might be going on.

We did see in 2024 and also 2023, this widening in the gender pay gap.

And of course, that was as the labor market started to cool.

2022 was really the very, very hot year.

And then we saw a slight easing on that front.

And what we think might be a factor is that companies started calling people back to the office.

And as we said before, workers did win a lot of remote work flexibility during the pandemic.

And

many people especially those of parents with young children or people who have other caregiving responsibilities do find that not having to commute just add an enormous amount of very valuable time to your schedule but as people were being called back into the office many women that I spoke to for the story went through this and just said I can't do this it's too hard with my kids or with my caregiving responsibilities even people without kids just say it's too much and it's not worth it so they were quitting and taking a different job and often that came with a pay cut but

Many workers decided it was worth it to be able to preserve that flexibility in their lives.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

American women are more educated than ever before.

So in many ways, women are in a very strong position to succeed in their careers.

But there are certain structural issues that are just difficult and hard to overcome and that women tend to just bear the burden of more profoundly things like childcare and eldercare.

So I think a lot of people are struggling to make it work.

We have seen extremely high inflation over the past few years, which has really made it hard for families to pay for things like care services that they might need.