Changing the Face of the C-Suite: Supporting Caregivers in the Workplace Research Report Request
Thank you for your interest in Changing the Face of the C-Suite: Supporting Caregivers in the Workplace, an updated take on the previous curated research report, The Workplace Journey: Caregiving, Career Breaks, and Reentry from the Gloria Cordes Larson Center for Women and Business (CWB)! Download the full report.
Executive Summary
Caregiving can occur in many forms, and as such, a whopping 73% of the workforce identifies as a caregiver. The average caregiver contributes 20 hours of unpaid labor per week, leading to almost one-third of caregiver employees voluntarily leaving their jobs due to the impact of their responsibilities. For organizations, it is a business imperative to support caregivers, as US businesses are estimated to lose almost $3 billion each year due to absenteeism – and that figure only cites lack of childcare as the reason for absence, implying that this figure should be much higher to account for all caregiving experiences. This report explores the changing landscape of working caregivers, the context of history and power of access to resources and support, and the unique challenges facing diverse caregivers of all kinds.
The role of the pandemic in creating challenges and raising awareness to of existing challenges cannot be overstated:
- Most childcare providers were reliant on tuition from parents in order to stay open, even though they could not be operational for several months. In March 2021, President Biden invested $39 billion in childcare to support parents returning to work and support childcare centers with additional subsidies for funding. While states have stepped in, the federal funding expired on September 30th of this year, known as the “Childcare Cliff”.
- An estimated 10 percent of those who contract the COVID-19 virus will experience symptoms longer and more severely than before, with 1.2 million people estimated to be left with disabilities.
- While the home health industry has long suffered staff shortages, COVID-19 introduced new challenges and exacerbated existing ones. Retention, training, access to PPE, low wages and benefits, and lack of childcare or school contributed to employee attrition. Recognizing that those formal caregivers also need support in order to provide their services is an important interdependence in our system: to support caregivers better, there needs to be a reliable industry of well-paid, well-trained healthcare workers who have their own needs met, too.
- In a report released in December 2021, it was estimated that over 3 million women left the workforce over the course of over 18 months of the pandemic due to caregiving responsibilities. From McKinsey, industries with an overrepresentation of majority women were disproportionately hit by economic losses: retail, the arts and public administration, food service, and hospitality. Other industries, such as education and healthcare, are also reliant on women, and while they may have held job security, issues such as burnout, safety, and stress disproportionately impact this workforce.
To retain this growing sector of the workforce, organizations will need to take intentional steps to provide more flexibility, provide greater mental health support, and invest in more resources for caregivers to access career breaks, childcare, home healthcare, and other types of formal support, and to create access to these benefits at all levels so that those most vulnerable and intersectionally marginalized are not further disadvantaged. Full recommendations can be found at the conclusion of this report, as well as a glossary of terms.