Hot girl summer is about to come to a crashing halt, and winter is coming for women
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- This year's hot girl summer was led by the women who propped up the US economy.
- It's about to come to a crushing end as pandemic-era federal aid expires.
- The aid has been funding childcare for the past two years, which helps keep many moms working.
This year's hot girl summer was dominated by tomato and strawberry aesthetics, "girl dinner," and "girl math."
And then, of course, there was Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and "Barbie," all credited with massive boosts in spending and even propping up the economy.
Together, those women's tours and that movie — plus the premiere of Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer," which opened on the same day as "Barbie" — are projected to add $8.5 billion to US output in the third quarter of this year, Bloomberg Economics reported.
Plus, women are working at record levels. For just the third time since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began collecting the data, women make up half of the workforce.
But what felt like a celebration of what women could achieve is coming to a crushing end, and we could see an exodus of women from the workforce this fall.
That's due to the expiration on September 30 of nearly $24 billion in federal funds, which helped keep childcare services afloat for the past two years. The biggest investment in childcare since World War II was part of the American Rescue Plan of 2021.
The funding's end could result in the shuttering of more than 70,000 childcare programs and leave about 3.2 million kids without childcare services, the nonprofit think tank The Century Foundation estimated.
That's because much of the funding was used to increase wages for the workers at childcare centers. Without the funding, providers will likely either have to cut employees' pay and hope their staff doesn't quit, or raise prices to keep workers and risk losing customers.
That would detrimentally, and disproportionately, affect women.
For starters, the closures would drive many women to leave the workforce so they could tend to their kids, since women perform most of the caregiving in America, according to data from the Labor Department.
Look at 2020 as an example. In a Kaiser Family Foundation survey, one in 10 women with children under 18 said they quit their jobs in 2020, and half of this group said school closures were one of the reasons. The study polled 3,661 women and 1,144 men between November 19, 2020, and December 17, 2020.
Simultaneously, if childcare centers closed, working women would bear the brunt — in a 2020 report, the National Women's Law Center found that 95% of childcare workers were women.
Parents, experts, and lawmakers have previously told Insider how vital childcare is to working parents. Without it, many leave jobs so they can take care of their children.
A June report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a philanthropic organization, found that 13% of children ages 5 and younger had seen their families contend with job changes because of issues with childcare.
"Too many of those raising children are unable to secure care that is compatible with work schedules and commutes," Lisa Hamilton, the president and CEO of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, said in the report.
"When parents can't find affordable, quality child care in their community, it's a nonstop financial and logistical burden for the whole family — and I hear about this so often from parents who are stressed and small business owners who've had their 'help wanted' signs up for way longer than they'd like," Sen. Patty Murray, a longtime affordable-childcare proponent, said in a statement to Insider.
While Democratic lawmakers are pushing legislation to solve this problem, it lacks Republican support and faces a difficult battle in Congress.
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