The “Motherhood Penalty”: COVID’s Impact on Working Women

Over the last year, working moms have experienced serious burnout. Between the pandemic, closed daycare centers and schools, work from home and isolation from support systems, they have had countless challenges to negotiate and too few resources to draw on. We are just starting to understand the toll the pandemic has taken and the long-term implications for women, their families and society as a whole. Recent U.S. census numbers show that 3.5 million mothers with school-age children left work last spring. In this episode, we talk with Lindsey Feitz, director of the University of Denver’s Gender and Women’s Studies program and a mom herself, about what this means for gender roles, which mothers are the most vulnerable and postpandemic concerns.