The pandemic devastated working mothers — but we were already struggling to find support in the workplace long before COVID-19.
It’s been well over a year since Sarah Lee decided to leave her long-time role as a radiology technologist, and she still remembers the exact moment she hit her breaking point.
It was Mother’s Day weekend and a toddler and his baby sister were admitted to Lee’s department for scans, both reportedly victims of child abuse. Thinking of her two children at home, who were almost exactly the same ages, she excused herself from the lab for the first time in her career so she could cry.Through a colleague at the hospital, she learned about a new role that would take her out of the daily grind of radiology and put her in charge of training staff instead.
She’s hardly alone. Since the onset of the pandemic, one in three working moms said they considered downshifting their careers or leaving their jobs altogether,Like Lee, Jasmine Baker worked in a field that made remote work impossible during the early days of the pandemic. Sharing childcare duties with her husband didn’t come entirely naturally to either of them, she admits. Eventually, rather than volunteering to stay home, she began asking her husband to take time off instead. “I learned to prepare myself for the awkward silence,” she jokes. “The expectation is for us [as moms] to handle it.”