Janet Yellen: "Work lives and personal lives are inextricably linked"

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May 10, 2021

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Keisha Lance Bottoms won’t run for reelection in Atlanta, the U.K. elected its first Black female mayor of a major city, and Janet Yellen knows that work lives and personal lives are connected. Have a great Monday.
– Work gets personal. For over a year now, we’ve been covering the childcare crisis facing American women. On Friday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen put that crisis in simple terms.
“Our policymaking has not accounted for the fact that people’s work lives and their personal lives are inextricably linked, and if one suffers so does the other,” Yellen said. “The pandemic has made this very clear.”
If there was ever an issue smack dab in the center of work lives and personal lives, it’s access to childcare.
The Treasury secretary was addressing journalists at a White House press briefing following the release of the April 2021 jobs report. The monthly report showed that amid slowed hiring—the U.S. economy added only 266,000 jobs in April, the weakest month of job growth since January—women are yet again being left behind. Per a National Women’s Law Center analysis, for every woman who dropped out of the labor force last month, nearly 2.2 men returned to work.
Yellen’s explanation puts those numbers in context. When women and caregivers lack support, women’s working lives continue to bear the consequences.
This report arrives exactly a year after one of the most dramatic jobs reports of the pandemic. It was between February and April 2020 that 4.2 million women dropped out of the labor force, Yellen pointed out on Friday.
“Nearly 2 million have not yet returned,” the Treasury secretary said. “The challenge before us is to help these 2 million women to return to the labor market.”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
The Broadsheet, Fortune’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women, is coauthored by Kristen Bellstrom, Emma Hinchliffe, and Claire Zillman. Today’s edition was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.

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