As an expectant mother, Rachel Shelton began all the preparations for having a child. She began shopping for baby clothes, preparing a nursery, and looking for childcare for when she prepared to return to work as a public school teacher.

Finding a daycare was much more difficult than she expected.

“I was just a few weeks pregnant, just finding [out] the news sharing with family, I got on some waitlist, and I just had no idea how hard it was going to be to find childcare that match my job. Some of the centers that we got on waitlist for when I was a few weeks pregnant, he was four years old, before, we got spots in those places,” Shelton said. “I just thought if I want it to work, I would be able to work and he would have a place to go.” 

Shelton eventually made the difficult decision to leave her teaching job after her second son was born, and in 2019 found a position teaching at a preschool where both her children attend.

Then the pandemic hit, and Shelton’s career was upended once more. The mother of two found herself out of a job, homeschooling two young children.

“Our school has not reopened and doesn't have plans to right now. My kids are both in other situations now, but again, that just shows that there weren't enough childcare spots before the pandemic. And then after the pandemic that's gotten even worse,” she told Spectrum News. 

Shelton’s struggle is one that the Department of Labor says is more common than you may expect.

“When women have to take time out of the workforce to provide care or when they have to scale back, that impacts what opportunities are available to them in the future of their career as well,” explained Sarah Jane Glynn, a senior advisor in the Women's Bureau at the US Department of Labor. 

“This is both an economic emergency for folks right now, but my fear is that even once we emerge fully from the pandemic, and can go back to something closer to normal, we may still be paying really severe consequences for these last couple of years, even 10, 20, 30 years in the future, because of the potential that it has to really impact women's entire careers, not just in this moment.”

Glynn co-authored a new report on the impacts COVID-19 had on women that was released by the Labor Department in March titled Bearing the Cost: How Overrepresentation in Undervalued Jobs Disadvantaged Women During the Pandemic. The report concluded that women, and especially women of color, were hit harder by the pandemic due to job segregation, the gender pay-gap, and other environmental factors.

According to Glynn, these losses could have impact well beyond the next decade.

“When schools went remote, when daycare centers closed, when adult day services closed, you know, all of the things that that brought care back into the home, women kind of got pulled back and away from work and into their households to be taking care of kids and other people,” Glynn detailed in the report.

Glynn also explained that due to job segregation, women were at a disadvantage. There are more women in fields such as education, childcare, service, and hospitality, which Glynn said saw greater job losses than other sectors, and not all of those jobs have returned.

“If we look at just three sectors, education, and health services, government, and leisure and hospitality, that represents about 55% of all the jobs that were lost early on in 2020. But 62% of the jobs that were lost by women were just in those three industries, right. So this occupational segregation, this sorting of men and women into different jobs, it made women more vulnerable during the pandemic,” Glynn explained. 

The wage gap also played a big role in how women were impacted by the pandemic. In 2020 and 2021, women made just $0.83 for every $1 a man made.

“The person who earns less is probably going to be the one who takes the hit and either stops working or works fewer hours. And in most instances, that's going to be the woman. So it becomes this perpetuating cycle over time, right where the wage gap pushes women out,” explained Glynn.

“Women have less money coming in, and they're less likely to have access to things like employer provided health care or employer provided retirement benefits. So this creates additional vulnerability beyond just that job loss piece with the pandemic," Glynn continued. "It creates economic vulnerability all the time.”

“It's bad for individual families, when their wages are lower," Glynn added. "It's bad for individual workers when they have difficulty accessing the kinds of jobs that they might want. But it's also bad for the economy overall, because it means people have less money to spend and and are doing worse than they might be otherwise.”

While Shelton’s children, now ages 6 and 3, have begun to move on, she is trying to figure out what is next for her career. 

“It has all felt so precarious. Even this past year, you know, the younger one gets a runny nose, and that's home from school for a week. So, you know, that's really hard and stressful to think about going back to work,” she explained, adding she is looking for positions outside of the classroom, where she may have the opportunity to work from home.

Shelton has also begun working with Moms Rising, a group that advocates for issues facing women, mothers, and children.

“I'm living this struggle right now as a mom with young kids, but I just want people to understand that it goes beyond just this time in a woman's life that we as a society need to value caregiving, and having children and in a way that moms can have children and be in the workforce and have their kids cared for,” Shelton said.

“We're always going to have young children in our country, we're going to have parents that need to work in our economy," Shelton added. "I just feel like it could be better for so many people.”