News outlets across the country like Time magazine, the Wall Street Journal and the Minnesota Star Tribune have picked up on a trend: Mothers of young children are leaving the labor force (front page, Sept. 14).
Minnesota is no different. Here, the labor force participation rate of mothers was 82.33% in January 2025, but 75.32% in June — a 7-percentage-point loss in just six months. By comparison, the labor force participation rates of Minnesota fathers went from 94.02% in January to 93.73% in June — a difference of only 0.29 percentage points.
Women, and mothers specifically, are an essential part of the labor force, contributing trillions in GDP and being the driving force behind a variety of industries, including health care, education and service occupations. A 2023 analysis by the U.S. Department of Labor found that if 5 million more women were to participate in the workforce nationwide, it would generate $775 billion in additional economic activity each year. However, research shows that mothers’ labor force participation is a complex and multifaceted issue, and remote work, child care costs and cultural gender roles are all parts of the puzzle.
Child care, or the lack thereof, makes a significant difference in mother’s labor force participation, evidenced by the increase of mothers entering the workforce when children reach 5 years old and become eligible for affordable or free child care in the form of school.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the labor force participation rate for mothers of children under 5 in 2024 was 68.3%. For mothers of children aged 6-17, it shoots up to 78.0% — almost 10 percentage points. A U.S. Census Bureau study also recently found that higher child care costs reduce labor force participation among mothers, and that low-income mothers are disproportionately affected. In Minnesota, child care costs have recently climbed to the third-highest in the nation, beating out states like Arizona, Colorado and California.
Expensive child care is a uniquely complicated problem to solve. The economic reasons for families, however, are often simple; if child care is unaffordable and someone must stay home, it makes sense for the lower earner to do so. But when the gender pay gap persists, with women earning on average 80 cents for every dollar a man earns in Minnesota, this understandable sacrifice has consequences. When fathers are twice as likely to be the top earner in an opposite-sex couple, the choice of who stays home becomes a continuation of a large-scale pattern that perpetuates economic inequality.
The Minneapolis Federal Reserve recently studied how marriage and children drastically widen the labor force participation gap among men and women. Among unmarried people with no children, the difference in labor force participation is negligible, only around 1 percentage point. Among married parents, however, women’s labor force participation is almost 20 points lower than men’s. If we want to increase women’s labor force participation, access to child care must be part of the equation.
Child care is infrastructure that benefits everyone. It’s essential to the functioning of the economy and quality of life for all Americans. Ahead of the 2026 legislative session, there is an opportunity for policymakers to consider how investments in child care or other strategies to increase access to child care have the potential to bolster the economy and improve the lives of Minnesota’s families.