The Pandemic Recession Disproportionately Affected Moms

Excerpt from the Open Vault Blog of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis
The Pandemic Recession Disproportionately Affected Moms
By Ana Hernández Kent

The COVID-19 recession reinforced many of the barriers mothers face and was truly a “mom-cession” in that mothers disproportionately faced setbacks. A larger share of mothers than fathers found themselves out of their jobs, and many mothers were pushed out of the labor force entirely. This matters, because more and more American families rely on mothers’ wages, despite moms being paid less than dads. This gap means that moms must make fewer dollars stretch further, a problem made even more acute by rising prices of groceries, gas and other essentials.

Compounding these struggles, mothers—particularly single mothers—often have extremely low levels of wealth. Research shows that single moms suffer a “motherhood wealth penalty,” having just $7,000 in median wealth compared with more than nine times that amount for single women without children. (Single fathers, by the way, do not experience a commensurate “fatherhood penalty”—in wages or in wealth.) That extra $58,000 means greater financial security, like ensuring that trip to the ER for a broken arm doesn’t plunge the family into debt.

Taken together, this means that after the COVID-19 recession hit, not only were moms more likely to be out of a job, they also had fewer resources with which to withstand the income loss.

Single Mothers Have Little Wealth

SOURCES: Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances and author’s calculations.

NOTES: Wealth is rounded to the nearest $1,000; 95% confidence intervals are shown by the error bars. The differences in median wealth between the three groups with overlapping error bars does not reach the level of statistical significance. Single mothers had median wealth significantly lower than the other three groups.

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Source: Why Supporting Working Moms Can Benefit Families, the Economy, and All of Us. (n.d.). Www.stlouisfed.org. Retrieved July 20, 2022, from https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2022/jul/benefits-of-supporting-working-moms

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