Moms First Founder Reshma Saujani on stage discussing childcare
Erica Price
Reshma Saujani had the attention of the room. Executives, investors and advocates packed in a Midtown Manhattan office on a Wednesday morning. This is the kind of crowd that had spent the past year losing sleep over artificial intelligence, tariffs and supply chains.
Saujani, the founder of Moms First, wanted to talk about something else.
"The biggest risk to business stability isn't being discussed in the boardrooms," she says in an on-stage speech. "The real disruptor that should be keeping all of us up at night is childcare."
After the panel ended, I sat with Saujani to press on something. She'd argued from the stage that childcare has long been treated as a personal problem rather than a business one. I asked why that framing persists when the data argues otherwise.
"Women in these roles rarely say in their exit interview, 'I'm leaving because I don't have childcare,'" she says. "That movement — of women actually naming it — hasn't happened yet. You feel economically fragile. Dispensable. You don't feel like you can articulate the financial strain you're on and what your employer could actually do about it."
That silence is costing U.S. businesses up to $70 billion a year.
A new report from Moms First, developed with McKinsey & Company and based on a survey of approximately 1,700 working parents, puts the number on the table. Childcare instability drives absenteeism, attrition, reduced productivity and workforce exits. Roughly 60% of that $70 billion, up to $45 billion annually, is concentrated among what the report calls the foundational workforce: nurses, teachers, retail workers, manufacturing line operators, truck drivers. Shift-based roles where an absent worker produces an immediate operational gap. A missed nursing shift means an understaffed hospital. A vacant manufacturing role slows a production line.
Read against the current jobs data, the stakes get harder to ignore. Healthcare added 390,000 jobs over the past year — more than the rest of the economy combined — in a sector that is nearly 80% women. Education, retail, hospitality, transportation: the sectors the report identifies as most exposed to childcare instability are generating virtually all net-new employment right now. Manufacturing, which the administration has staked its economic identity on, is still down 82,000 jobs from January 2025. The growth economy and the political economy are not describing the same workforce.
Ramya Parthasarathy, a McKinsey partner who co-authored the report, made the connection explicit at the launch event.
“These workers keep hospitals running, goods moving, shelves stocked," she says. "When childcare breaks down for this group, the impact is immediate and visible — affecting not just individual people or companies, but entire systems and communities."
The Moms First report, citing Anthropic research on labor market impacts, notes that foundational human-facing roles are among the least exposed to automation, given the physical and interpersonal nature of the work. Parthasarathy said it plainly from the stage: "These are going to be the last jobs to be fully replaced by AI."
Saujani went further in our conversation. The white-collar displacement AI is already producing clarifies the foundational workforce picture.
"People are already understanding what it means when we say this is a white-collar layoff," she says. "That means there are a lot of blue-collar workers who are actually going to remain in the workforce. And we need to figure out how we're going to retain them."
Which makes the gender data inside the report worth sitting with. Men and women in the foundational workforce experience childcare breakdowns at similar rates. Yet women report 21% more time absent and 11% more days working unproductively than their male counterparts facing the same disruptions.
Only 15% of private-sector employers offer any childcare benefits. The report finds that every intervention it measured, including schedule flexibility, backup care, stipends, and on-site centers, delivers positive ROI, ranging from 5% to 300%. The highest-returning option is also the cheapest: giving workers control over their own schedules. Also known as flexibility.
Chris Hoyle, CMO of Simple Modern, a retail and manufacturing company based in Oklahoma City ran the numbers. The company hired young, he says, and the math was straightforward.
"How important is it that you retain your best employees and remove any option that would make them want to go somewhere else?" he says. "For us, it hasn't been this great economic burden that's kept us from growing."
Simple Modern now provides a $6,000 annual childcare stipend to employees with children under 13. Utilization among eligible employees is near 100%. Attrition among those using the benefit is zero.
Saujani resists the "childcare as infrastructure" framing her own report occasionally uses, preferring a harder image. When I asked how to talk about childcare in a way that actually moves people, she didn’t reach for the roads-and-energy-grids analogy that is so common. She said something simple: think about a woman choosing between feeding her babies and funding her daycare.
"Working parents want flexibility and stability and predictability," she says. "Just give me control over my own time. And having control over time means you can't have a one-size-fits-all test. That is very hard for employers."
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