Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently said, “Childcare is a textbook example of a broken market.” She’s right. Women have disproportionately left the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic, partially due to a lack of childcare. However, the U.S. childcare system was broken well before the pandemic. Racist and sexist beliefs have allowed this market to fail and ensured we never had a system designed to work for all families, childcare providers or children.
Racism and sexism in childcare can be traced back to forcing enslaved Black women to provide childcare, and continued as they became domestic workers who were often excluded from job protections. It shows up today in the form of low wages and lack of benefits for the disproportionate number of women of color working in childcare.
The pattern is repeating itself during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gladys Contreras was one of an estimated 100,000 licensed in-home family childcare educators across the U.S., two-thirds of whom stayed open to care for the children of essential workers. When the pandemic began, 11 out of 12 families withdrew their children from her Connecticut-based program, leaving only one paying family. Not wanting to leave that family in the lurch, Contreras stayed open and operated at a loss, choosing between paying rent and putting food on her table.
When help came, Contreras,...
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