'If You’re Looking For Work-Life Balance, This Isn't It.'

“If you’re looking for work-life balance, this isn’t it,” an ad for a role at for Solace, a “healthcare advocacy marketplace,” warned job-seekers earlier this year. “We’re here to redefine healthcare—and that demands speed, obsession, and relentless urgency.”

With job listings like that, is it any wonder that since January, net 338,000 women have left the U.S. labor force—while 183,000 men have joined? This is according to a new analysis by the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly jobs reports. 

Unemployment rates largely remained stable or decreased across groups in June, but the unemployment rate among Black women aged 20 and above was 5.8% that month, almost twice that of white women 20 and above (which was 3.1% in June). The figure for Black women has climbed steeply since March 2023, when it reached a post-pandemic low of 4.2%.

As the Covid-19 pandemic progressed and working from home became a trend, many employers seemed to be suddenly aware of workers’ needs for work/life balance. That benefitted women in particular, allowing them to better balance childcare with work. A report published in November 2020 by the British flexible working campaigner Anna Whitehouse found that almost three-quarters of women said their work-life balance had improved during Covid.

But as the jobs market is becoming more competitive, employers seem to be forgetting their enthusiastic support for work/life balance. “Americans are facing monthslong job searches and competition from laid-off workers as companies shrink headcount,” the Wall Street Journal noted—and that is causing employers to become more comfortable making extra demands of workers’ time.

Job ads from the consultancy group McKinsey now explicitly state that its workers must “attend meetings outside of traditional business hours,” the WSJ reported, while Rilla, a software company, told prospective software engineers not to bother applying unless they are willing to work 70 hours a week.

The economist Claudia Goldin has written about so-called “greedy jobs,” theorizing that women may be less likely to advance in jobs that require extra hours because it’s too difficult to balance them with family responsibilities.  

That’s bad for women, who tend to take on more childcare and household labor than men. And figures—also from the NWLC—have shown that the lion’s share of federal workers who have been laid off by DOGE are women and people of color. Those who can’t meet the increased demands of employers will, naturally, lose out.