School and day care center restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic have presented enormous challenges to parents trying to juggle work with child-care responsibilities. Still, empirical evidence on the impact of pandemic-related child-care constraints on the labor market outcomes of working parents is somewhat mixed. Some studies suggest the pandemic had no additional impact on the labor supply of parents, while other studies show not only that it did but that the negative impact was disproportionately borne by working mothers. 1 In this Chicago Fed Letter, we describe estimates of the impact of the pandemic on prime-age (25 to 54) parents' labor market activity through the fall of 2020, with a particular emphasis on mothers. We show that the labor force participation (LFP) of mothers, i.e., the share of working-age mothers employed or seeking employment, declined by an additional 0.6 percentage points in the spring and 0.3 percentage points in the fall, above and beyond the negative toll that the pandemic had on labor market attachment of prime-age adults without kids. The impact translates to roughly 120,000 and 60,000 fewer prime-age mothers in the labor force in the spring and fall, respectively. This estimate is more than fully driven by a decline in employment. Indeed, we estimate roughly 200,000 fewer prime-age mothers were employed throughout the pandemic. The largest impact has been on Black, single, and non-college-educated mothers, mirroring widening employment disparities in the broader labor market since March.
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