Between 2024 and the second quarter of 2025, the share of Fortune 500 companies requiring full-time in-office work went from 13% to 24% (Care.com). In the same window, workforce participation for women ages 25 to 44 with a child under five dropped nearly three percentage points after growing steadily between 2022 and January 2025 (Care.com), with the sharpest decline among Black women.
These two facts are usually reported as separate stories, but there’s a critical overlap.
When researchers asked the women who left why they did, 42% who voluntarily left their jobs said caregiving responsibilities, including the cost of childcare, were the strongest factor behind their decision (Catalyst).
Women are doing the math of what return to office (RTO) costs them—the strain of work schedules and commutes that don’t align with daycare pickup, limited family support. Add aging parents who need help navigating medical appointments and the household logistics that don’t pause when the office calendar fills up. The majority of these women are not choosing to leave. They run the numbers, and the numbers choose for them.
I’m a working mom too. My day is squeezed into roughly eight hours with a hard stop at daycare pickup. I can juggle it because daycare is close, I have family for backup support, and I work from home. That setup is the exception. Most working moms don’t have it, and the data shows what happens when companies remove the conditions that made it possible for them to stay employed.
The RTO policy is coded as a productivity and culture cohesion move. While those might be legitimate reasons, companies have neglected to consider the costs for women. “Women choosing to leave” is not the same thing as “policies designed without women’s non-work commitments in mind.” One frames the exit as a personal preference, thereby making it nobody’s problem to fix. While the other names a structural issue.
Kate Bahn, chief economist at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, told The Washington Post that “the U.S. is the only advanced economy that’s had declining female labor force participation in the last 20 years, and a lot of that is because of lack of social safety net and caregiving supports.” (Deseret News) She called it a long-term trend that’s worsening.
The framing of “choice” is inaccurate because choice implies options. Most of what’s happening is a constraint dressed up in the language of preference.
Working moms: What’s the gap between how your company describes its RTO policy and how it’s landing for you? I want to hear the specifics.