This Labor Day, women have much to celebrate. Never in history have female workers had more ways to achieve both family and professional success than we do now. Although modernity brings its own serious challenges, innovation continually clears more paths from which to choose.
We just need the freedom to do it.
When I became a mother, I rose at 3:30 a.m. to feed my baby and go to the university for work and classes; by the birth of my last child, I could write work articles and school essays on my own schedule at home.
With advancing technology, other women should enjoy even more opportunities than I eventually did, and I become concerned when I see regulatory creep restricting their options instead. Well-meaning or not, legislators need to reconsider these regulations.
Women comprise 95 percent of the childcare workforce. They also head 80 percent of single-parent households and need affordable child care. Unfortunately, heavy-handed legislation often renders both providing and utilizing childcare services prohibitively expensive.
State requirements that exceed what parents themselves would provide make little sense. Requiring workers to have a university degree, for example, as four states do, drastically increases the cost of operating a day care, and the rule is particularly preposterous given that many mothers place their children in care as they attend university.
Licensing standards extend to seemingly every possible aspect of a care facility, most of which mothers would never even consider at home. For instance, facilities in 45 states must provide a minimum number of square feet per child, with numbers ranging from 25 to 100. Surely, a brief peek would be sufficient for a mother to determine if she deemed the center too crowded for her taste.
Since time immemorial, parents, extended families, and friends have cared for children without college degrees and mandatory square footage rules, and they are capable of doing so now.
Women make up just a slight majority (52 percent) of freelance workers in the country, but due to their more prominent role as caregivers to their children, the flexibility of gig work is often a necessity rather than a luxury for mothers.
In a supposed effort to “protect” freelancers, legislators in states like New Jersey and California are increasingly embracing new laws that devastate these independent workers. Stricter benefit requirements for employers discourage them from hiring these workers as employees, leading to no jobs at all for many freelancers. This can include married women who get benefits through their spouses, single women who have no need for them because of benefits at their own full-time jobs, or women with portable benefits.
For us, this legislation is strictly a loss.
Despite a major shift over time, more women still tend to enter lower-paying fields than men.
Unfortunately, according to the Brookings Institution, these careers nevertheless often have high entrance costs. This includes the time and fees for the nearly 30 percent of roles requiring occupational licensing. Worse, low-paying, female-dominated, relatively benign professions such as cosmetology have even higher barriers to entry than more safety-sensitive fields like emergency medical technology (EMT).
Consequently, these regulations disproportionately impact young women.
Women are perfectly capable of balancing career and family, and both legislators and women themselves need to trust their competence. Mothers can choose daycare facilities based on their own concerns and knowledge of their individual children’s needs. They can decide if they need positions that provide benefits for their families. They can provide basic services without thousands of hours of training away from their families and thousands of dollars in fees.
In short, women can juggle their many roles like the pros they are. They don’t need bad policy to get in their way.