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“Subsequently we turned to seasoned theater professionals to understand the meaning behind the disconnection between what is well established in other fields and in theater advocacy compared to the interview and survey results. These further consultations led us to conclude that a silence surrounds the topic of family responsibilities in the theater world.”
– Women’s Leadership in Resident Theatres Final Report, Sumru Erkut & Ineke Ceder, Wellesley Centers for Women (2016)
“[B]y the time American women are 40 to 44, 86 percent of them are mothers, and unless they are affluent — or have a retired but still energetic grandma who’s willing to pitch in full time when the kids are little — the child care crisis hits families hard.” - Day Care For All, The New York Times (2019)
“The majority of freelancers are women, and some people predict that half the workforce will be freelance by 2020...A résumé gap is still seen as a liability, even though some 30 to 40 percent of highly qualified women take time off at some point.” - The New Midlife Crises, Oprah.com
"A 2018 online survey of 1,000 parents in the United States conducted by Credit Karma, a personal finance company, found that 67 percent of respondents had gone into debt in order to buy their children necessary items such as food, clothes and shoes. Revealingly, some 69 percent of those surveyed by Credit Karma said that they kept their child-related debt a secret, and avoided discussing it with other parents." - The Unspeakable Cost of Parenthood, The New York Times (2019)
"According to YouGov, the median amount spent on preschool and day care was $400 a month, and 22 percent of the parents said they spend $1,000 or more...The survey did not include costs associated with nannies or babysitters, which can also drain a family’s finances." - The Costly Burden of Day Care and Preschool, The New York Times (2019)
"The majority of parents (67%) have spent money they didn’t have to buy their children essential items or experiences, which parents said included items such as food, shoes, clothes and school supplies." - Credit Karma Survey (2018)
"After decades of convergence, the gender gap in employment outcomes has recently plateaued in many rich countries, despite the fact that women have increased their investment in human capital over this period. We propose a hypothesis to reconcile these two trends: that when they are making key human capital decisions, women in modern cohorts underestimate the impact of motherhood on their future labor supply." - The Mommy Effect: Do Women Anticipate the Employment Effects of Motherhood?, National Bureau of Economic Research (2018)
"The share of women in the United States labor force has leveled off since the 1990s, after steadily climbing for half a century...The new analysis suggests something else also began happening during the 1990s: Motherhood became more demanding. Parents now spend more time and money on child care. They feel more pressure to breast-feed, to do enriching activities with their children and to provide close supervision." - The Costs of Motherhood Are Rising, and Catching Women Off Guard, The New York Times (2018)
"The cost of child care has increased by 65 percent since the early 1980s. Eighty percent of women breast-feed, up from about half. The number of hours that parents spend on child care has risen, especially for college-educated parents, for whom it has doubled." - The Costs of Motherhood Are Rising, and Catching Women Off Guard, The New York Times (2018)
"'It is deeply puzzling that at a moment when women are more prepared than ever for long careers in the labor market, norms would change in a manner that encourages them to spend more time at home,' the researchers wrote. One possible reason is that increasingly, people who work long, inflexible hours are paid disproportionately more, Ms. Goldin’s research has found. More women with degrees and these kinds of demanding jobs are having children, and they’re likely to be married to men with similar jobs, as Marianne Bertrand, an economist at the University of Chicago, has described. A result is that dual-earning couples may feel the best choice is for one member, usually the mother, to step back from work so the other parent can maximize the family’s earnings...The lack of family-friendly policies in the United States — such as paid family leave and subsidized child care — most likely plays a role, too. Although policies have improved somewhat since the early 1990s, women’s labor force participation in countries that have more generous policies has continued to increase, unlike in the United States...As women do more paid work, men have not increased their child care and housekeeping tasks to the same extent — another surprise for young women who, research has shown, expected more egalitarian partnerships." - The Costs of Motherhood Are Rising, and Catching Women Off Guard, The New York Times (2018)
"Generations of girls have been told they can achieve anything they aspire to, including having both a career and children — and many women have done so. But at the same time, both work and parenting have become more demanding. The result is that women’s expectations seem to be outpacing the realities of public policy, workplace culture and family life." - The Costs of Motherhood Are Rising, and Catching Women Off Guard, The New York Times (2018)
"The amount of money parents spend on children, which used to peak when they were in high school, is now highest when they are under 6 and over 18 and into their mid-20s." - The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting, The New York Times (2018)
"Parents, particularly mothers, feel stress, exhaustion and guilt at the demands of parenting this way, especially while holding a job. American time use diaries show that the time women spend parenting comes at the expense of sleep, time alone with their partners and friends, leisure time and housework. Some pause their careers or choose not to have children. Others, like Ms. Sentilles, live in a state of anxiety. She doesn’t want to hover, she said. But trying to oversee homework, limit screen time and attend to Isaac’s needs, she feels no choice.
'At any given moment, everything could just fall apart,' she said. 'On the one hand, I love my work,' she said. 'But the way it’s structured in this country, where there’s not really child care and there’s this sense that something is wrong with you if you aren’t with your children every second when you’re not at work? It isn’t what I think feminists thought they were signing up for.'" - The Relentlessness of Modern Parenting, The New York Times (2018)
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