More than 455,000 women left the U.S. workforce between January and August of 2025, and a recent study says caregiving pressures are the top factor pushing women out of the workplace.
“Forty-two percent of women who voluntarily left the workplace did it because of the cost of care — child care, eldercare, home-care,” said Jennifer McCollum, president and CEO of Catalyst, the nonprofit that conducted the research, whose aim is to advance women through workplace inclusion.
The study found 37% of the 1,029 women over the age of 18 who left their jobs said they would have likely remained, if they worked in organizations with flexible schedules, McCollum said.
“More than a third of the women who left voluntarily said, ‘I just don’t have enough control over my own schedule. If I had more control, I probably could make this work,'” McCollum said.
Caregiving pressures were often compounded by economic strain.
“Eighteen percent of them said, ‘When I look at the trade-offs between what I have to do from a caregiving responsibility and pay, and the lack of flexibility I have, and the amount of pay that I get, I cannot make this calculus work anymore,'” McCollum said.
Market uncertainty and concerns about job security were also factors that led to women voluntarily leaving the workforce.
Layoffs disproportionately affected women of color
While 58% of the respondents left their jobs voluntarily, 42% were let go.
“Those from marginalized racial and ethnic groups were more likely to report being laid off (53%) than white women (37%), highlighting a disproportionate impact on women of color, who are more likely to be caregivers, in the federal workforce, and in frontline roles,” according to the Catalyst report.
“We all remember what’s been happening within the federal government, the nation’s largest employer,” McCollum said. “The layoffs disproportionately impacted women, and primarily Black women, who tended to work in those areas of government that were impacted by the government layoffs.”
McCollum said when figures of nearly half-a-million women left the workforce, “there were misguided headlines.”
“A lot of the headlines were, ‘Women have lost their ambition,’ and ‘They want to stay home now,'” McCollum said. “That was entirely not the case.”
Not the first time women left the workplace in droves
“What happened during COVID was we saw a mass exodus of women,” McCollum said, adding that many had been laid off due to the economic uncertainties businesses were facing. “We all held our breath and said, ‘What’s going to happen in the COVID recovery years” of 2021, 2022 and 2023, experts wondered.”
“They came back full of ambition and full of hope because they saw they could make work and life work, with the flexibility that we all had, coming out of COVID,” McCollum said. “What’s happened in the last two years? We’ve seen a reversal of that flexibility.”
What does the current departure of women from the workforce hold for the future?
“This moment is especially risky,” McCollum said. “We are at the very tip of this spear, and we can still do something about it.”
The political climate poses a notable challenge for business and industry leaders to reengage with women who have left the workforce.
“When women are leaving the corporate world, or the government world or NGO and nonprofit world en masse, like we’re seeing now, and you combine that with fewer leaders wanting to talk openly about that … we are creating the conditions for a labor market crisis,” McCollum said.
She said the industry will likely see ripple effects as they reengage with the hiring process.
“Where it’s less comfortable to talk about things like gender,” McCollum said. “We will see the negative repercussions of those, one to two years from now, if we don’t start addressing it right now.”
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