Emboldened by the promise that they could “have it all,” women climbed corporate ladders and advocated for wage parity with their male colleagues. They joined yearlong day care waitlists, meal-planned, carpooled and optimized family logistics to make sure nothing slipped.
Then the pandemic hit.
As child care centers and schools closed, kitchens and closets turned into offices, and children became companions on conference calls. The impossible juggle reached a breaking point. By March 2021, nearly 2.3 million women had exited the workforce in what economists dubbed “she-cession.”
But COVID also helped reimagine work for caregivers. In the first year of the pandemic, the share of U.S. remote workers tripled, and women made up more than half of all home-based workers. By 2024, the employment for mothers surpassed pre-pandemic levels.
But this year, the trend began to reverse. Close to 455,000 women left their jobs in January alone, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, following rigid return-to-office mandates across government and the private sector. At the same time, pandemic-era child care relief that had supported working parents lapsed in 2023, causing child care centers to close or raise their prices.
Experts say it’s the steepest decline in women’s labor-force participation since the pandemic. Each month since, the number of women with young children in the workforce has fallen, according to research from the University of Kansas.
“There’s a paradox,” said Cali Williams Yost, expert on workplace flexibility and founder of the Flex+Strategy Group. “We know we can work differently and more flexibly, but there’s now almost more rigidity in the model, undermining the very flexibility that caregivers, like mothers, need.”
The women I spoke with echoed that sentiment. The old “lean in” mantra no longer resonates with many mothers, in part because decades of striving for it revealed how untenable and costly the quest for elusive work-life balance actually is.
“We believed in the promise of having it all — at work and at home — but for many women, what we have instead is exhaustion,” writes Corinne Low, economist at the Wharton School, in her book, “Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours.”
Yet, the term “stay-at-home mother” doesn’t fully capture the reality for many women today. Instead, women are carving out a third path: negotiating part-time roles with employers, launching a business or monetizing a social media following — all while attending pediatrician appointments, soccer games and tending to daily demands of parenting.
Clear-eyed about the trade-offs, women are getting creative about crafting a life of meaning, on their own terms.
Choosing the third way
In 2019, Brittany Larsen was exhausted. As a vice president at a political communications firm in Utah, she logged endless travel miles and shouldered a heavy client load, that included Pfizer and Delta. She was often the only female executive in the room.
On the day her promotion became public, Larsen, now 36, was also diagnosed with infertility. “I remember Googling, ‘How to tell my boss about IVF,’” she told me. She kept her appointments secret, and when her first cycle failed, she knew something had to change.
“I know it didn’t go well because I was working so much,” she said.
She made the decision to leave her job, but continued consulting directly with a political client. Wanting more flexible work, she made a website for an executive coaching business, tapping into her corporate network for clients.
Although she had planned to continue her corporate job after starting a family, the years of IVF, and paying for it, shifted her priorities. In 2020, she finally conceived; her two children are now 5 and 2.
“By the time my children came, I didn’t want to leave them,” said Larsen, who now typically works about 10 hours a week.
Empowered by her newfound freedom, she wanted to help other women do the same.
This year, Larsen and her business partner Angela Ashurst launched the Cheetah Collective, a service that helps clients, most of whom are mothers, start a business — from the idea to administrative paperwork and designing a website.
“We saw the shift way before the headlines,” Larsen said.
Before the pandemic, many women were up against a “Faustian” bargain — a corporate job or family, Ashurst said. Their venture offers “another path,” she said.
Old work model crumbling
The traditional nine-to-five office model was already beginning to crumble before 2020, and the pandemic only accelerated the shift, said Yost. The research from Yost’s group Flex+Strategy Group, which dates back to 2005, showed that 97% of the workforce had at least some flexibility in where and when they worked, and a third, mostly men, were already working remotely.
But this year’s strict return-to-office policies at companies like Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Dell have upended the emerging flexibility of the pre-pandemic era, which then became the standard during the lockdowns. Black women have been disproportionately affected by the recent workforce shifts, according to experts, including the rollback of diversity initiatives. They also faced higher rates of job loss and slower reentry compared with other groups.
“The U.S. is the only advanced economy that’s had declining female labor force participation in the last 20 years, and a lot of that is because of lack of social safety net and caregiving supports,” Kate Bahn, chief economist at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, told The Washington Post in August. “It’s a long-term trend that appears to be getting worse.”
“Women can have all of the above: be ambitious, be family-focused and financially independent,” Ashurst said.
In a sense, it’s a modern, more attainable version of “having it all,” the idea that lawyer Anne-Marie Slaughter deemed impossible in her viral 2012 essay “Why women still can’t have it all.”
Starting small businesses has been one of the ways that women have navigated the in-betweens of family and career.
In 2025, women started almost half of all new businesses — and that’s a 69% increase from 2019, according to Gusto’s report. Fractional roles, where high-level executives are hired on a part-time basis, have grown 57% since 2020, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
Even today’s so-called “tradwives” are not retreating from the public sphere. They are business-savvy mom-preneurs who are scaling their brands and building online followings, with their children, pets and kitchen messes in the backdrop. In a recent interview with the Business Insider, Utah influencer Hannah Neelaman said she and her husband started Ballerina Farm so she “wouldn’t have to put my children with a nanny or day care, that they could somehow be intertwined.”
The women that Larsen and Ashurst work with are “sick of the system” and seeking a sustainable balance between work and family on their own terms.
Most are also married with husbands who are primary breadwinners.
“I feel really lucky that this isn’t a make-or-break business that I can try this out and we’re not dependent on it,“ said Brooke Lynch, a life coach who is part of the Cheetah Collective. Larsen, whose husband is in commercial real estate, views her income as “fun money,” while she can spend most of the time with children.
Ashurst, however, doesn’t have the second income to fall back on. After her divorce two years ago, she had to ramp up her side hustle — a professional resume writing company — and turn her “bonus money” into the main income while still being there for her six kids, including a teen with special needs.
The goal behind empowering women to launch businesses isn’t exactly entrepreneurship for its own sake, the founders told me.
Instead, “it’s closing that gap for women who want to make money and fulfill their ambitions without being locked down in the corporate nine to five,” Ashurst said.
For mothers, ‘it’s work time all the time’
Losing her identity and interests in motherhood was one of the biggest fears for Jennifer Banks, when she started having children. Banks, a Utah mother whose four children range from 7 years to 5 months, had been an elementary school teacher, but she shifted to running a day care out of her home so she could keep teaching and still earn an income.
Still, she didn’t feel fully fulfilled by the rhythm of teaching and caretaking alone. So last year, she wrote and published a book about helping women “nurture their dreams as they nurture their children,” launched a coaching business with the same mission and started a podcast.
She’s become an advocate of the “drink while you pour” approach and encourages mothers not to postpone professional goals until after their children grow up.
Now, she teaches preschool two days a week (she sends her own kids to a different preschool) and spends a few afternoons working on her coaching business.
“It doesn’t have to be one or the other,” said Banks, with her baby cooing in the background. “There is room for both.”
“I think the gray area speaks to this new frontier where women are saying: Well, we want to make room for family life, we need it — and we also want to make room for ourselves to grow and contribute alongside.”
— Neha Ruch, author of the book “Power Pause”
With the help of the Cheetah Collective, she’s laying the groundwork for a long-term dream: owning her own event space for women, complete with an adjacent child care center.
But for all the perks of flexibility, it also means that work bleeds into family life and the other way around.
Kelsey Szamet, a partner at employment law firm Kingsley Szamet, says she often feels “chained” to her phone or computer even while she’s with her children. “In some ways, it’s work time all the time and we’re just trying to fit other stuff in,” Szamet said.
She often works at nights and on weekends.
”I think that — it is unfortunately a trade-off of the flexibility that we want at the same time,” she said.
Neha Ruch, author of the book “Power Pause,” who advocates for scaling down professional pursuits to focus on family, describes this middle ground between a demanding full-time job and staying home full-time as a “gray area.”
“I think the gray area speaks to this new frontier where women are saying: Well, we want to make room for family life, we need it — and we also want to make room for ourselves to grow and contribute alongside,” Ruch told me earlier this year.
Leaning into family life, she argues, can help women build a more holistic feminist model, a “robust, nuanced, and sustainable identity in which no single role — paid or unpaid — dominates,” she writes.
So, what about having it all?
The need for flexibility isn’t just a woman’s issue, Yost emphasizes. Today, an estimated 38 million Americans provide elder care, roughly 55% women and 45% men.
“This is an issue for everybody,” Yost said.
In 2030, about 1 in 5 people in the U.S. will be over age 65, or about 20% of the population. Experts say this shift will put strain on families and caregivers.
“Elder care is now just as overwhelming as child care, and there’s just as little support,” Yost said. “When we frame this as a women’s issue, we overlook the reality that people are trying to fit work and life together at every stage of adulthood.”
In a tight labor market, the economy simply can’t afford to lose women, Yost explained. Some estimates predict a labor shortage of 4 to 6 million workers, with the U.S. needing to add 4.6 million workers by 2033 to avoid a crisis, according to Staffing Industry Analysts.
Fewer women at work also narrows the diversity of the candidate pool.
“We will see less people of all different types bringing their ideas and strengths to the table,” said Szamet.
“I think for women, to have it all is to own their own desires.”
— Angela Ashurst
She hopes that women’s departures will force companies to adjust — add remote options and expand family-support benefits.
“We have to step back and define the flexible work model that is going to work for our businesses and for people,” said Yost. Otherwise, she says “there will not be enough people to run our organizations and grow our economy.”
In 2014, PepsiCo Chairman and CEO Indra Nooyi dispelled the myth of excelling equally at career and family life.
“I don’t think women can have it all,” Nooyi said. “We pretend we can have it all.”
She added, “Being a stay-at-home mother is a full-time job. Being a CEO is three jobs in one. How can you do justice to all of them?”
The message is not defeatist, both Larsen and Ashurst believe. Instead, it’s about timing and perspective.
As many women leave traditional workplaces, the notion of “having it all” means something different than it did even a decade ago.
It’s less about personal sacrifices or guilt in the name of professional success and more about women aligning their choices with what they value most.
Having it all, Larsen said, is possible, but not all at once. She wants to help women move past old labels and scripts, and instead be more confident about going after the more rewarding, albeit often risky, options.
“I think for women, to have it all is to own their own desires,” Ashurst said. “And to ask: What do I want? How do I define success for me? What should my life look like?”