Every morning starts the same way: A 6 a.m. alarm and an hour to prepare for the day before her kids get up. By 7 a.m., it’s time to get the kids ready for school and her turn to carpool to school. Then, a full day at the office.
By 5 p.m., it’s time to pick up the kids from after-school childcare and to soccer practice and make time to run to the grocery store before it’s time to pick them up again. When they all finally get back home, it’s time for dinner, homework, and answering emails, before bath time. If she’s lucky, the kids will be down by 9 p.m.—just enough time for a little more work before knocking out at 10 p.m. And that’s only Monday.
Women with children under 6 spend an average of 8.15 hours on weekdays and 10.5 hours on weekends caring for their child, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The work women do to support their families is almost always unpaid, despite being worth billions of dollars.
If American women were paid for all their caregiving labor, it would be worth $683 billion, according to an analysis from the National Partnership for Women & Families (NPWF). Nearly two-thirds of caregiving is done by women, and they average nearly 300 hours of unpaid care work worth $4,900 each year. If both men and women were paid for caregiving, they would earn $1.1 trillion.
This is a conservative estimate, says Katherine Gallagher Robbins, a senior fellow at the NPWF. The analysis used the average between childcare workers and home health aides wages, which is $16.38, but this work is typically underpaid, she said.
One in four Americans is a caregiver, and they are spending more time than ever before caring for their children and older family members as the 65-plus population grows at record rates.
Caregivers often have to choose between taking unpaid time off or going to work while missing leaving loved ones who are sick or need them, Robbins told Fortune.
“Often, it means you can’t be in the labor force at all, and we especially see this happen for moms,” she said.
Women are less likely to get hired after having children, and mothers lose an average of $237,000 in lifetime earnings, 15% of what they would earn if they did not provide any family care, according to a 2025 Urban Institute analysis. Loss of earnings directly impacts benefits from Social Security and employment-based retirement plans.
“That’s a big deal. That’s a lot of cash,” Robbins said.
How companies are responding and offering working caregiver support
Some companies are trying to ease the burden of caregiving for employees by expanding childcare and paid leave.
Levi Strauss & Company offers immediate access to parental leave to both corporate and retail hires, regardless of whether they are hourly or salaried workers, according to the NPWF. Many companies require employees to work for several months to be eligible for parental leave. Their policy earned them a spot on NPWF’s list of companies leading paid-leave policy.
“As a result, [Levi Strauss & Company] has experienced higher retention rates and greater employee satisfaction as employees feel supported and encouraged to return after taking leave,” according to NPWF.
Aside from leave for newborns, management consulting firm PwC offers employees “Just-in-Case” benefits and reimburses up to $50 for emergency care for up to 20 weekdays and unlimited weekend days each year. In fiscal year 2025, PwC employees used more than 8,000 back-up care days and received $5 million in reimbursements, according to HRM America.
AARP also offers employees up to two weeks of paid time off to care for family members who are older than 50 or have serious health conditions. AARP didn’t respond to Fortune’s request for more information about the program.
Employees lead the way
These policies often come from employee advocacy.
While working at Airbnb in Mexico and Brazil, Chio Paniagua and her colleagues in Latin America realized their American counterparts were getting egg-freezing benefits, she told Fortune. Paniagua is now a Big Tech and crypto strategic advisor, having also previously worked in communications for Instagram, Coinbase, and Uber.
“We were able to internally advocate for ourselves so that every woman in the company across the country could get access to the same type of care,” she said.
A representative from Airbnb told Fortune the company offers egg preservation globally for eligible employees.
In 2019, more than 1,800 moms at Amazon directly lobbied founder Jeff Bezos for emergency day care assistance, after seeing employees quit because they couldn’t find childcare.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon began temporarily offering employees up to 10 days of subsidized emergency child or adult care. Employees could pay $25 a day for in-center childcare or $5 per hour for in-home child or adult care.
“We’ve heard from our employees that access to affordable family care, for both children and adults, is particularly challenging during the COVID crisis, and we are committed to support them in this unprecedented time,” Beth Galetti, then-senior vice president of human resources, said in a statement at the time.
Amazon now gives employees free memberships to Sittercity and Years Ahead, platforms where people can seek both child and elder care and access background checks and references for caregivers.
Remote work isn’t enough
Common policies, such as remote or hybrid work, may help caregiving by offering more flexibility, but also can exacerbate inequalities for certain workers, Robbins of NPWF said.
“Flexible work, in general, is a really important complement when possible to other family-supportive policies,” she said, adding it’s no substitute for childcare, support services for disabled people, or paid family leave.
Remote and hybrid work is also not available to many people, from service to health care workers, many of whom tend to have lower-wage jobs and less access to paid leave and childcare, she said.
“I think it’s an important compliment that we should leverage when we can, but we also should be attentive to the inequities that it can exacerbate,” she added.
