But while workers wait for Congress to make a decision on child care — particularly ahead of the upcoming school year — many working mothers feel paralyzed.

Jenny Galluzzo, co-founder of the Second Shift, a platform that matches professional women with freelance and consulting projects, said the site has seen four times as many applicants since February as women try to make up lost work hours with part-time consulting work.
Beyond that, most women tell her they’re just waiting.

“You can’t plan ahead in any concrete way. And that stress manifests itself because you don’t know how to interact with the workforce. If you’re out looking for a job, how can you know what job to take because you don’t know in two months what your kids’ school situation will be?”

Galluzzo said. “I worry for women because we’re taking an undue burden of all of the care and the invisible labor. I worry about all the strides we’ve made just being set back.”

What we are seeing play out is years of keeping women from positions of power where they could have turned their lived experiences into policy, said economist Olugbenga Ajilore with the Center for American Progress. It’s years of child care being a “women’s” issue — not a priority.

“If we have more women in the economics field, if we have more women in Congress, child care would not be on the back burner,” Ajilore said. “When we think about women leaving the labor force, we’re not just losing economic output but we’re losing that contribution limit. They shape the culture and the way you do business, the way we think about things. That’s what we are losing with this.”

In many ways, though, coronavirus has served as a magnifying glass, bringing into sharper focus issues like child care that have long been ignored — and employers are responding. Companies that once resisted flexible work set-ups, and particularly remote work, are starting to embrace the idea.

“We have been fighting for the ability for women to work remotely and flexibly for years. It’s the number one thing women want for employment and companies have now been forced to see that that model works,” said Galluzzo, from the Second Shift. “And when the economy comes back and jobs are more plentiful and our kids are in school, I see this as ultimately a benefit because you don’t have to convince people any longer that [flexibility and being remote] works.”