Fewer parents are working due to COVID-19: Study

According to Pew Research, parents are working less due to the pandemic and minority families are more likely to be affected. Yahoo Finance's Zack Guzman and Kristin Myers discuss.

Video Transcript

ZACK GUZMAN: If you're like me and you've been working at home, this year has been trying at times. And perhaps you are burnt out, as well. It's been a tough year. A new study here, though, from Pew Research is digging into that toughness. I don't even have kids. But for parents out there, incredibly tough as they struggle to deal with child care through the pandemic. And that study revealing that more working mothers and working fathers are sharing the burden about equally when it comes to the impacts here. And for more on that, I want to get to Yahoo Finance's Kristin Myers with the details. Kristin?

KRISTIN MYERS: Hey Zack. I'm not a mom either. Parent-parents do not count as a part of this study. But as you're mentioning, Pew Research essentially digging into how this pandemic is impacting mothers and fathers in their employment totals. So we actually have a nice chart here that's going to show you over the last couple of months, how those employment figures have been dipping over the last several months for those mothers and those fathers.

So compared to 2019, let's start with the moms. Employed mothers decreased from 69% in 2019 to 63.4% in 2020. That's September 2020. Now on fa-- for fathers, the employed amount of fathers decreased from 90.5% in 2019 to 85.6% this year, September of this year, Zack. So we're seeing fathers taking a pretty large hit there when it comes to their employment figures.

Now we are seeing, however, Pew decided to actually break this out by race. What we are seeing is-- as is typical and happen-- when--what happens in these downturns, minority parents are actually being impacted more than their white counterparts. We're seeing that the employment of Black mothers decreased by 7.4%, whereas Hispanic mothers decreased by 8%. Now compare that to the decrease of employment among white mothers, which actually decreased by 4.1%.

Now if you look over at fathers, you are seeing a similar trend for minority fathers, Zack. The employment of Black fathers decreased by 6.3%. 7.2% of a dis-- decrease there for the employment of Hispanic fathers, whereas, again, their white counterparts for white fathers, that employment figure dropped by 4.2%. Now interestingly enough, they've done a break-out on-- on the ages of children.

What they found was that fathers with very young children, ages 3 or less-- so essentially toddlers-- their numbers started to decrease greater than fathers who were parents of children older than three. Now the reverse is actually true, Zack, for mothers. So mothers of children older than the age of three actually had a--a greater decrease in employment than mothers of children who were toddlers.

And if you look at the work hours, Zack, essentially, fathers who were employed at work, they had their hours cut back by around three hours in a work week. That's compared to two hours for moms. And I do want to point out here, though, that moms-- as is typical in any year, not even just in a pandemic-- they frequently work far less hours. So we are seeing a huge impact and a huge hit to parents all across the board, Zack.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah. And you're not a parent. I'm not a parent. But for anybody out there watching who is, shout out to you, because I don't know how you're doing it through all this and making ends meet. It's--It's incredibly tough just as a single guy out there, but do want to shout-out the parents. Maybe we'll need a Father's Week and Mother's Week next year. Appreciate that update, Kristin.