Why moms are leaving their paid jobs

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 5 September 2025

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

Moms are quitting — or getting pushed out. Workforce participation for mothers in the U.S. has been dropping for most of this year, and the reasons are more complicated than return-to-office mandates. Today on the show, we talk to moms about why they left their jobs and to economist Misty Heggeness, who has studied the phenomenon.

Find more of Misty’s research here.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR. This is the indicator from planet money. I'm Terriam Woods. I'm Waylon Wong and it is
0:16.1	Jobs Friday. That day of the month when we get fresh data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on
0:22.9	how workers are doing. Today's numbers were a little lackluster. They show that the economy
0:28.4	added 22,000 jobs in August, which is below expectations. The unemployment rate ticked up just
0:34.5	a bit to 4.3%. It's the highest rate in four years.
0:39.1	The data suggests that the overall labor market is in this holding pattern. We're not seeing a lot of
0:45.2	new jobs, but we're not seeing a big exodus of workers either. Beneath the surface, though,
0:50.8	there are groups of people who are leaving the workforce, and one of those groups
0:55.3	is mothers. Here in the indicator, we love hearing from listeners. So we reached out to
1:00.9	working moms, and we heard from a bunch of you. Today on the show, we hear some of those
1:05.1	stories about why they've scaled back their work lives. And an economist explains what the
1:10.2	state of working moms tells us
1:11.9	about the health of the broader labor market. Nicole Damstetter lives in Orlando, Florida,
1:19.6	with her husband, their four-year-old daughter, two dogs, a cat, and five chickens. You've got your own
1:25.2	eggs, right? So you're like making money in this economy. It's great. It's great. I use them to barter with the neighbors.
1:31.3	Nicole spent roughly the last decade in the tech sector, helping non-profit organizations use software.
1:37.2	And she says she had always defined herself by her job. But that began to change when her daughter
1:43.3	started part-time preschool.
1:45.3	She was really coming alive and getting this personality being at preschool. And then I started
1:50.6	to think ahead and realized I've only got a little time left before she starts real, you know,
1:57.1	big kid's school, as we call it, kindergarten. And I don't want to miss this. And this is the
2:04.5	time that I'm not going to get back. And I really reflected that I wanted to be home with my daughter.
	...

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