Moms navigate a post-pandemic shift back to offices

When the pandemic hit in 2020 and New Jersey’s government agencies went remote, Monica Valenzuela couldn’t have been happier. “Everything just worked,” recalls the mother of two. “It was easier to be with my family. ... Because I was very happy, I was motivated and efficient.”

But in 2021, her state agency called her back to the office, three and then four days a week. Her home office in Morristown was replaced by a windowless cement cubicle, and flexible hours went back to a strict 9-to-5 schedule. “The fact that the place we were working had no windows – zero – made me really sad and claustrophobic,” she says. Two hours of commuting every day didn’t help either. 

A car accident last year caused her to take stock: “I felt like the universe was telling me something, like, ‘Monica, you cannot continue like this.’ ... I really liked my work, but it seemed to me that they didn’t really adapt to the new era that we are living in,” she says. Last summer she quit and took a new job – all remote.

As the labor market recovers from its pandemic slump, companies have been reevaluating the arrangements they offered employees during the health emergency. High-profile business leaders have insisted on in-person work as being more productive and collaborative. Many companies – 72%, according to an April survey of employers in 17 nations – have mandated a return to the office for at least part of the week. While the shifts over the past year or so pose challenges to workers of all types, parents in particular feel the reduction in flexibility. 

Strains can be especially severe for those struggling to pay for child care. Yet, amid the stresses, many mothers are also sticking with their jobs, and surprisingly few have been forced out of the workforce. Labor participation by women in the age range of 25 to 54 years old just notched a monthly record of 77.8% in June. 

The lockdown work-from-home era may be over. But in many cases, the post-pandemic office is friendlier to mothers than the pre-pandemic version.

Mindy Savides, an 11-year veteran of The Clorox Company, remembers the old days when she left early for child care pickup. “I was the sole person walking out of the office at 4:30, 4:45, and I worked on an open floor plan with a very big team,” says the mother of three. “It did not go unnoticed.”

Now, the office is far more flexible, where teams decide how many days a week people should come into the office. And work hours have become far more flexible so that workers can say they’re dropping off their children at school so they won’t be available for video calls before 9:30 a.m. “This is, like, game changer,” Ms. Savides says. “I can put that [restricted availability] out there without any concern of being that lone sheep.”

Not all employers have been so accommodating. A year ago, Elon Musk brought all Tesla workers back to the office, famously saying anything less than 40 hours a week there was “phoning it in.” He instituted a similarly strict policy when he acquired Twitter later that year. JPMorgan Chase has also instituted a five-day-at-the-office schedule for managing directors, salespeople, and retail branch workers, although CEO Jamie Dimon has acknowledged the disproportionate burden of child care on women. “Modify your company to help women stay home a little,” he said earlier this year.

Financial services companies, such as Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, have been particularly insistent that workers return to the office, as have several tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, IBM, and Meta. 

“Someone could always say, ‘Do what you did prior to the pandemic,’” says Joy Chun, a mother of two who works for a financial services company in New Hampshire. “Well, my kids are of an age that they don’t need [a nanny] full time.” And the uncertainty of when her company asks her to come into the office, often on short notice, makes it difficult to plan child care.

Summers are the toughest. “They’re wanting to go to the mall; they’re wanting to get together with their friends,” Ms. Chun says. “When I’m working from home, they can have whoever they want to come over. [But] I don’t feel comfortable when there’s no adult at home for them to do that.

“I would say the stressor is really trying to keep my kids happy, and not just stuck at home by themselves,” she says. “It’s part of the working-mom guilt.”

Some working mothers, like Lixiao Wang, have thrived by going into an office. With remote work, “the boundary is very blurry,” Ms. Wang says. “Your desk is right in your bedroom. When you wake up, you see your work. And then when you go to bed, it’s still there.”

When she works in person, however, there’s more of a sense of “closure” at the end of the day. Ms. Wang, who works in Manhattan for a large bank, says she has certain advantages that make in-person work more feasible. Her 13-year-old son is old enough to maneuver the city on his own. “He takes the bus; it’s very safe.” And she has a short commute.

Even some single moms, like Tori Snyder, have been surprised by the upside of going to an office. Long before the pandemic, the Pittsburgh-based single mother had gotten remote work down to a science. She ran her own business and worked as a consultant.

“Part of the reason why I liked being able to work from home was that I could maximize my time. I could do laundry, meal prep, walk the dog, clean. I could do all the things that I needed to do at home so that when my son was home from preschool, I could dedicate that time to just him,” she explained. “My concern was that if I went to a full-time job, I wouldn’t have those hours at home. ... But actually, the very opposite happened.”

After getting an offer from a client in business development, she began working in an office in March, which gave her structure and boundaries. “I think I was just trying to do too much in a day when I worked remotely. And I felt like I was rushing all the time,” she says. The structure has been good for her son, too. “He knows Mommy has an office, that Mommy goes to the city, that Mommy has to do something.”

The advantages she has – her mother helps with child care, and her team at work has been flexible and supportive – aren’t available to all mothers, especially those in lower income brackets.

“In the underserved areas, you have a much higher percentage of single moms,” says Arthur Langer, founder of Workforce Opportunity Services, a nonprofit that recruits, educates, trains, and hires workers from underserved communities. They can’t afford child care, if it’s even available, which means his organization, beyond hiring the mother as a contract worker for a company, sometimes steps in and subsidizes child care. If all works well, the company eventually hires her directly with enough of a pay boost so she can afford child care.

If there’s one commonality these working mothers share, it’s the importance of good and affordable child care. The pandemic – at one point lockdowns closed down about two-thirds of day care centers – has focused a bright light on the need. Red states as well as blue states have begun to enact child care subsidies, and the system has rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, says Anne Hedgepeth, chief of policy and advocacy at Child Care Aware of America, a nonprofit advocacy group that is pushing for federal subsidies for working mothers. The problem is that the system is still up to 3.6 million slots short of the need, she adds.

It’s not clear that enough states or corporations, even those pulling employees back to the office, can fill that gap. “You shouldn’t have to win the boss lottery or the geography lottery in order to have families and businesses thrive,” says Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, executive director of MomsRising Together, a group advocating more federal support for child care. She’s optimistic that the growing momentum behind child care support will carry over at the federal level. “It’s no longer a question of if but when we build the care infrastructure we all need.”