Small Wage Hike for Workers Won’t Fix the Broken Child Care Sector: Let’s up the Ante with Technology
Just months before the pandemic hit, women had crossed a major threshold as they became the majority of job holders in the U.S. Since then, however, millions of women have suffered a big reversal, with nearly 3 million leaving the workforce, mainly due to Child Care demands.
The loss of women in the workforce dramatically impacts the whole economy. Consider this: When a woman leaves the workforce, that family income is impacted four times the annual salary that was lost.
As we embark in the recovery from the pandemic and our first “Shecession,” we must reignite our economy and get people back to work — especially women — by giving the Child Care sector a huge shot in the arm.
A recent report by San Diego Workforce Partnership and The San Diego Foundation, for example, found that San Diego has the second lowest female labor force participation among top 10 cities in the United States. According to the report, there is also a gap of 190,000 between the number of available licensed Child Care slots in the region and the number of children who need care because their parents work.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Child Care sector about 34,000 workers, mostly low paid and mainly minority women living in low-income households. Couple that with the fact that the number of Child Care centers and family in-home daycare providers in Los Angeles have been shrinking, and you get a struggling industry. All these trends echo throughout the US.
In an era where women are projected to make up 60% of the workforce in the next five years, we can help improve these statistics by moving the needle on a regional scale.
This starts with better supporting our Child Care sector. While California Child Care providers recently ratified a historic first contract to raise wages and expand access to Child Care across the state, much more needs to be done to help daycare centers succeed. We can best support Child Care providers, workers, parents, and businesses with innovative solutions for quality and affordable Child Care.
Technology — not a small pay raise — is a critical step in truly improving Child Care workers’ quality of life while helping parents get back to work. In order to fully recover and thrive, providers need access to more tools and resources to grow their programs. We need to make the existing inventory of Child Care slots more efficient, and the only way we can do that is via real-time inventory tracking and allocation of enrollment.
By giving Child Care providers a boost, we are also supporting working parents — especially women — and businesses. Providing on-demand affordable and quality Child Care options to our working families creates a more equitable workforce, and helps eliminate the wage, race, and gender gap. It also creates a new crop of women entrepreneurs who want to open their own daycare centers, which would increase the much-needed supply of Child Care providers.
As for the recent small wage hike for California Child Care workers, I see your $1 and raise you $100. It’s time to up the ante on boosting the quality of life for Child Care providers, children, and families by automating the entire system. All bets are on technology — everybody wins.
