Ed. note: Please welcome Vivia Chen back to the pages of Above the Law. Subscribe to her Substack, “The Ex-Careerist,” here.
NOW THAT TAYLOR SWIFT is “dreamin’ ’bout a driveway with a basketball hoop,” is this the death knell for female ambition?
It kind of seems that way. Not only is the richest, most influential female rock star in the world hinting in her latest album that she’s ready to hang it up for life as Mrs. Travis Kelce (they’ve been spotted house hunting in the suburbs of Ohio, of all places), but some worrisome data on women in the American workforce has come out.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, women are dropping out of the job market in notable numbers. In the last year, over 600,000 women abandoned ship (from a participation rate of 57.7% in 2024 to 56.9% this year). That’s a huge deal, reports the Economist, marking the biggest rise in the male-female participation gap since the 1950s.
Even more concerning: it’s women with college or higher degrees and young children who are responsible for this decline, says a new study by KPMG. Though these young women had been driving the record participation of prime-age women in the US economy, those gains began to erode in late 2023, dropping by 2.30% by August 2025. During the same period, college-educated men with young children saw their participation rate in the workplace rise by 0.31%.
This is puzzling. Because just when we thought that women were unstoppable (remember, they’re the majority in colleges, law schools, and medical schools), they’re instead losing ground. What is going on?
The female stigma is back!
“I think that a big reason for the exodus of women from the workforce is the insistence by many employers, including legal employers, that employees work in the office rather than providing them with the flexibility to work from home and utilize hybrid work schedules,” Roberta (“Bobbi”) Liebenberg, the co-author of a 2023 American Bar Association study on parents, tells me. Though flexible working arrangements gained steam during Covid, companies and law firms now require employees work in the office four or five days a week, which “means we are reverting back to where we were before the pandemic started,” says Liebenberg. “Just as in the past, women with children who work from home will be stigmatized and their ability to advance and succeed will be impeded.”
Then there’s the childcare crunch, worsened by the crackdown on immigrants. “An estimated one-fifth of childcare workers overall are immigrants, including one-fourth in center-based daycares,” reports the KPMG study.
To top it off, childcare costs have exploded. KPMG finds that prices for daycare and preschool have increased roughly twice as fast as overall inflation, with parents often spending 20–30% of their income on childcare alone. So all things considered, why shouldn’t women throw in the towel and stay home with the kids?
Fact is, this country has never made it easy for parents, especially moms, to work. The United States stands alone among developed countries in providing no federally guaranteed paid leave for new parents. As for state-sponsored childcare, forget about it. While government subsidized childcare is common throughout western Europe, here it’s regarded as a socialist fantasy – something that the radical likes of Zohran Mamdani would propose.
So is it the lack of flexibility or the shortage of childcare that’s pushing women to the brink?
For professional women, it’s the hostility.
“I think for less educated women, the cost of childcare is a major factor,” Joni Hersch, a professor of law and economics at Vanderbilt University, tells me. “But for more educated women, it’s the hostility. There’s now an attack on professional women, and it’s become acceptable to say things that denigrate women.” Normalizing that disrespect, Hersch adds, are people in power, such as Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, and Donald Trump.
The backlash against flexible work is another sign of the hostility. “There’s a rollback on anything that’s supportive of women,” says Hersch. “What I’ve found in my research is that men have always had more flexibility because the better jobs tend to be more flexible anyway. During the work-from-home period, women were starting to catch up; now, we’re at the margins again.”
But are there also larger cultural factors at play that are driving women from the workplace?
Men are living like their grandfathers.
In a new book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and How to Get the Most Out of Yours, Wharton School professor Corinne Low argues that women have been getting a raw deal at work and at home. Though they’ve made big strides in the workplace, women still shoulder most of the childcare and home responsibilities. Even for women in high-pressure jobs, the imbalance is stark: according to the 2023 ABA study, 65% of mothers vs. only 7% of fathers arranged for childcare.
“If you understand women entering the labor force as a gender revolution that came in and changed our attitudes about women’s role in society, then of course, men’s role would change, too,” Low told The Guardian. However, “there was no force acting on men requiring them to do something different.” In other words, while women have contorted themselves over the decades to adapt to the male workplace while running the home, men have had lives more or less the same as their grandfathers.
Are our daughters feminists?
And though this generation of young women were told by their mothers that it’s vital to be independent (I always preach to my daughters, keep working and depend on no man), that message might not be resonating. As Low puts the takeaway: “Your moms are really stressed out. Wouldn’t it be nice to not be so stressed out?”
Is that why the tradwife thing seems to be gaining traction? Because it’s easier, less fraught, and more fun? After all the hard work we’ve done to pave the way for our daughters – storming the doors of male educational institutions and bro-dominated professions – they just want to be June Cleaver living the suburban dream?
Where did we go wrong? But perhaps we’re overreacting. For one thing, women’s progress hasn’t been linear. Women’s participation in the workforce jumped dramatically from the 1960s to the 1980s, peaking at 60% in 1999. But in this century, it hit a low in 2015 of 56.7%, before reaching a post-covid high of 57.7%.
Maybe women will return.
The Economist offers some comfort, floating the theory that this most recent dip is temporary. “The fall seems to reflect a rise in the number of young mothers,” says the UK publication. With a surge of pandemic-delayed weddings in 2022, the resulting baby boom may simply mean many new moms are taking time off. “In some senses, this is good news: many will return to work after maternity leave,” it says cheerfully.
But will they, now that we live in a return-to-the-office and tradwife era?
Hersch isn’t convinced by the tradwife hype but is wary about what comes next. “I think they will come back,” Hersch says about the most recent crop of women who’ve dropped out. “But returning to the labor force years later is a different experience. What we see in European countries that have long parental leaves is that it doesn’t help women’s careers. The hiatus will help get them back to work but it won’t help with their earnings.”
Liebenberg makes a similar point about women who leave Biglaw. “Women will continue to be underrepresented in equity partner ranks and positions of leadership,” she says. “We have seen this movie before, and it is distressing.”
We’ve seen this movie like a thousand times. Because it seems no matter how many women fill the ranks of higher education and the professions, we are always playing catch up.
But I hate to leave on such a dour note. So here’s my remix: Swift will get her driveway and her hoop — and still rule her billion-dollar empire. At least in Taylor’s version, everything works out just fine.
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Vivia Chen writes “The Ex-Careerist” column on Substack where she unleashes her unvarnished views about the intersection of work, life, and politics. A former lawyer, she was an opinion columnist at Bloomberg Law and The American Lawyer. Subscribe to her Substack by clicking here:
