Michigan’s early childhood system is letting women down

A version of this column originally appeared in The Alpena News.

Michigan’s early childhood system is letting women down.

Insufficient state funding for providers, poor compensation for workers, and high costs for families harm both early childhood workers — 96% of whom are women — and moms who can’t return to the workforce without affordable and reliable child care.

Even as labor force participation rates are beginning to reach and surpass pre-coronavirus-pandemic levels, moms face unique disadvantages. While women generally are less likely than men to be employed or looking for work, parenthood exacerbates those differences. Moms with children younger than 5 are 26% less likely to be in the labor force than dads with children in the same age range.

And, when they are working, they aren’t paid as much. Equal Pay Day for women — the day when women catch up to what men earned in the previous year — already flew by this year on March 14, but Moms’ Equal Pay Day won’t arrive until September, marking how much longer employed moms have to work to catch up to what dads made last year.

The wage gap costs full-time working moms $17,000 annually, but Black moms are losing roughly twice as much. With an extra $17,000, Michigan moms could pay for nearly two whole years of child care.

Lack of investment in child care doesn’t just harm women with young children. It also harms the 22,540 workers — nearly one in four of whom are women of color — who provide care. Those are women who are well-trained — the majority have bachelor’s degrees — but for whom higher education and training does not translate to higher wages.

The median wage for child care workers was $11.13 in 2019, placing them among the lowest-wage earners in Michigan. Despite high levels of qualifications among early childhood workers, one in five lives in poverty. It is therefore no surprise the sector has high turnover and is currently experiencing shortages, having lost nearly 20% of its workforce compared to pre-pandemic levels.

A quality workforce demands quality wages. Child care workers in Michigan take home just $25,580 on average annually, less than half what kindergarten and elementary teachers earn. As workers achieve higher qualifications, the wage penalty for remaining in early childhood increases compared to other career paths.

Michigan needs competitive, cross-sector wage scales both to improve recruitment and retention in the field and to account for the value of the work. The governor’s proposal to create a refundable Child Care Educators Income Tax Credit of up to $3,000 is a good start for addressing the immediate problem, but we must go further to ensure workers are fairly compensated and have financial security.

But, importantly, as Michigan seeks to improve pay for early childhood workers, it must not do so on the backs of working families.

Families earning less than 200% of the federal poverty level, about $55,500 for a family of four, can qualify for child care subsidies. However, less than one in six income-eligible children younger than 5 actually receives a child care subsidy.

Even fewer eligible families are able to benefit from subsidies in some counties due to barriers like burdensome applications, unavailability of care during nontraditional hours, and limited spots compared to the number of families seeking care.

An additional barrier comes from the subsidies themselves, which require all available caregivers to be engaged in an approved activity — like work or school — to qualify, but many parents need reliable child care before they can secure employment. That creates a catch-22 for all families, but is especially acute for single moms, who head one in four households with children in Michigan.

While men are also harmed by barriers to affordable child care, a recent Pew Research Center report shows that, even in opposite-sex households, where wives are the primary earner, they still do more of the caregiving work.

So, if we want to make Michigan the best place to have a baby, we need to be building a child care system that works for families and meets the needs of working women.

Big investments in child care can boost labor force participation and narrow the gender pay gap for women in and out of the early childhood care sector.