Women Workers Are a Lifeline for the Economy

The newest jobs report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that 115,000 jobs were added in April 2026. This report follows months of volatile job gains and losses for the labor market, amounting to an average of 21,000 added per month since April 2025. Additionally, the unemployment rate for April 2026 remained at 4.3 percent. Although the latest report was largely upbeat, some signals of underlying weakness persisted. Long-term unemployment remained consistent, but the number of newly unemployed, or those jobless less than five weeks, ticked up by 358,000. Additionally, gains for prime-age women’s labor force participation pulled back slightly in April to 78 percent; however, the participation rate for that demographic remains above the 2019 average of 76 percent.

New analysis from the Center for American Progress finds that much of the labor market growth since the COVID-19 pandemic has come from women, especially women with young children. After the last recession, this increase in labor force participation rates (LFPR) among mothers was largely driven by policies directing additional funds to the child care sector. It was also speculated that return-to-work orders in recent years would greatly affect women with young children. However, original CAP analysis shows that very few people have access to telework at all, and among those who do telework, the rate has been largely stable since late 2023. Taken together, these data points indicate that telework has not played a large role in broad LFPR trends since return-to-office mandates began.

Women’s labor force participation is sustaining the economy

Since February 2026, for the third time since 1990, women make up the majority of the nonfarm employed. The gap between men’s and women’s nonfarm employment has been shrinking over the past two decades and has closed in part because of the growth in women-dominated industries and the simultaneous contraction of male-dominated industries. The health care industry—which was more than 78 percent women in April 2026—has become the backbone of the labor market, typically maintaining positive job growth even in months where the overall labor market has shed jobs.

Over the past two decades, from April 2006 to April 2026, LFPR of prime-age women (ages 25 to 54) grew 2.7 percentage points, while prime-age men’s LFPR fell by 0.8 percentage points. (See Figure 1) Despite women’s continued employment gains over the past two decades, a double-digit gap in men’s and women’s prime-age LFPR still persists and remains at 11.8 percentage points in April 2026.

Women with young children are driving economic growth

Prime-age mothers with young children continued to carry the labor force after the COVID-19 pandemic, even as nearly three-fourths of the total additional federal child care funding in pandemic-era stabilization packages—nearly $37.5 billion—ended in September 2023. There was a small but marked decline in labor force participation rates among women with children younger than 5 following that phaseout, however their participation still remained well above pre-pandemic trends. (see Figure 2) Additionally, the $14.99 billion in additional funds to the Child Care and Development Block Grant from the American Rescue Plan Act expired in September 2024, and the downward trend in LFPR for mothers with the youngest children continued. While prime-age mothers of school-aged children have also experienced gains in recent years, no gains have been quite as consistently large as those of mothers with children younger than 5. (See Figure 2)

Despite these gains, women with younger children still have a lower LFPR compared with mothers with older children, partly due to the lack of affordable and available, high-quality child care options. In fact, in 2025 46 percent of children younger than 6 lived in a child care desert—areas with insufficient licensed care relative to local demand—and this share was even higher for families of color and those in rural communities.

With most mothers either bringing home the lion’s share or more than one-quarter of their family income, the question remains: What motivates this labor force growth beyond child care and rising costs? In 2023, 69 percent of working mothers were breadwinners or co-breadwinners for their families. After the pandemic, a rise in telework was touted as the reason for their success, and more recent return-to-office mandates as a potential reason for a decline of mothers of young children in the labor market. However, the data do not fully support this theory.

Telework does not fully explain the growth in women’s LFPR

Telework has been pointed to as a boon for maternal LFPR by increasing flexibility for working mothers, but research during the pandemic showed that child care played a large coincident role. The rate of telework and the relatively flat trend since return-to-office mandates ramped up in 2023 and 2024 provide little evidence to support telework as a primary reason for the rapid rise in overall participation among mothers—or a parallel exodus from the labor market. More recent trends implicate shifting occupational composition toward health care and related roles that primarily employ women to the uptick in women’s LFPR.

According to original analysis from the Center for American Progress (see Figure 3), the vast majority of women, including mothers, do not have access to remote work options at all. Employed prime-age working moms with young children are the most likely parents to use telework or work from home for any number of hours, but even at the highest rates, about 7 in 10 of them still lack access. Among dads there is less deviation based on the age of the youngest child, and their rates are more similar to those of moms with school-aged children.

Maternal LFPR began to fall following the phaseout of the bulk of federal child care funding in late 2023. Meanwhile, telework continued its slight upward trajectory, but only in early to mid-2025 did it begin to come back down. At the same point in time, maternal LFPR was on its way back up, as shown in Figure 2. While telework can be helpful for working moms and scaling it up could be especially beneficial for those with young children, only about one-quarter of all working women currently can do it, and that share has been fairly consistent since 2024.

Conclusion

The latest labor market data show an economy being held together by women, especially mothers. Women have kept the labor market afloat by growing their labor share, and now represent the majority of the employed. More recently, they have even managed to do it with less investment in child care support from the federal government compared with a couple of years ago when the government still provided pandemic-era funding. Underlying today’s jobs report is the fact that more than half of workers are now women, and since the COVID-19 pandemic, the biggest changemakers among that group have been mothers.

The authors would like to thank Emily Gee, Hailey Gibbs, Jazmine Amoako, Bill Rapp, Bianca Serbin, and Cindy Murphy-Tofig for their help creating this product.