Moms, working from home, and affordable ELCC

I'll start with the clear disclaimer - this is not an in depth analysis. Rather, I was gathering a few numbers and I thought they were interesting. I want to find them again later, so I might as well post those here.

The first Friday of every month, I have a bit of a ritual - I download the most recent Labour Force Survey files from Statistics Canada and recreate a few graphs I like to keep updated. This one has been interesting: the red line shows the labour force participation rates of women whose youngest child is age 0-5. 

The participation rate of moms with young kids has always been lower than other parents, but they generally followed the same trends. In 2019, their participation rate was 75%. That rate climbed quickly post-COVID (while other moms and dads didn't really change much), and then settled in between 79% and 80% from 2022-2026.

The big question? What happened to these moms?

The importance of child care

People will quickly point to child care affordability. The federal-provincial ELCC agreements were initiated in 2021, with implementation starting in 2022. We'd expect an immediate impact on the employment rates of moms. A range of studies looking at similar intiatives (especially Québec's $5/day in the early 2000s), expecting a 5 percentage point increase in employment or participation seems perfectly reasonable to me. 

Sidenote: really interesting new paper from Baker, Gruber and Milligan here on longer term labour market impacts: https://sites.google.com/view/kevin-milligan/home/research/bgm-childcare3   (with lots of great references therein).

Another sidenote: I've heard people quick to dismiss the gains associated with the greater support many families now receive because there are really important gaps in this system. For example, a shift working mom needing coverage for night shift may find it difficult, if not impossible, to find affordable, safe, and reliable care for her kids. It's an important policy gap, but to rely on it as a way to dismiss policy success is simply lazy. Someone who truly cares about this will be critical, recognize the private sector has always had this gap, and challenge the government to work harder to fill it. This also points to the importance of provincial involvement, being as close to ground level as possible to find and fill these gaps.

What else happened - working from home

Unfortunately we don't have any great historical statistics on working from home. But we do know the expansion of WFH and hybrid options  benefitted parents - both moms and dads, and those trends for WFH levelled off higher than expected (check out an earlier paper where I mapped that out here: https://cdhowe.org/publication/settling-new-normal-working-home-across-canada/ ). The flexibility and reductions in commute time improve well-being and even productivity (potentially at work, but definitely at home). I have often wondered the effect this might have had on mom's job opportunities. While inflexible  (or 'greedy' - see Claudia Goldin's work) jobs are hard to balance with all the kid duties, WFH options might open up some occupations they couldn't consider before.

Looking at recent numbers from the Canadian Survey on Business Conditions (Table 33-10-1054-01, https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/cv.action?pid=3310105401 ), we can see many jobs are still remote or hybrid - around 30%. In industries where 'desk jobs' are common, it's even higher, from 1/2 to 2/3 of the workforce. 

And the recent trends for job postings suggest WFH is here to stay. Below, I copy the figure from Indeed's hiring lab (https://data.indeed.com/#/ ):

For us to claim WFH provisions are helping to drive the increase we saw in moms with young kids working requires us to take on some careful econometrics, which I haven't done. Mostly, we need to believe WFH options are affecting these moms and their labour force participation, but not other parents as much. I'm not confident in making any conclusions here yet.

But I will go so far as to state my expectation that both WFH and the ELCC affordability matter, as a pair. Mom might have a great new job offer in front of her, with flexibile hours and hybrid opportunities that make being a busy parent easier. But when the ELCC she needed was simply out of reach, it wasn't an option. 

Now there's a new set of opportunities.