What to Know About Biden’s Plans for U.S. Child Care

Around the globe, remote schooling and closed day-care centers during the pandemic forced parents to make painful tradeoffs between work and family. Women bore the brunt, abandoning the workforce in greater numbers than men, with little control over when they could return. In this, the pandemic greatly exacerbated child-care predicaments in many countries, including the U.S., where Covid-19’s economic fallout has been called the first “female recession.” Some governments are getting more involved in child care as a result, with U.S. President Joe Biden hoping to join their ranks.

It cost women at least $800 billion in lost income in 2020, according to the antipoverty group Oxfam International, which also estimated that job losses reached 5% among women, compared with 3.9% among men. Not all of that can be blamed on child-care issues, of course: Around the world, women are overrepresented in retail, tourism and food services, which were particularly hard-hit by shutdowns. In the U.S., more than 4 million women dropped out of the labor force at the height of the pandemic, many to become caregivers, and 1.5 million remained on the sidelines as of November.