The Ken-ergy Economy: How America’s War on Working Mothers Became a National Economic Emergency

6 minutes read time.

In the feminist utopia of the “Barbie” movie, the world was run by competent, successful women. In the real world of 2025, it increasingly feels like Ken has taken over. One expert has dubbed it the “Ken-ergy economy”—a post-pandemic backslide into a less flexible, more masculine-coded work environment, characterized by “return-to-office chest pounding” and a disregard for the realities of caregiving. This is not just a clever turn of phrase; it is a diagnosis of a profound and worsening crisis. New data reveals that hundreds of thousands of American women, particularly mothers with young children, are leaving the workforce at an alarming rate, reversing years of progress. This is not a series of isolated personal choices. It is a full-blown “economic emergency hiding in plain sight,” a crisis being actively engineered by a toxic brew of corporate self-sabotage, regressive government policies, and a cultural backlash against working women.

Part I: The Corporate Self-Sabotage

The first front in this war is being waged in the boardrooms of corporate America. The flexibility and remote work arrangements that allowed many mothers to re-enter and thrive in the post-pandemic workforce are being aggressively rolled back. According to the Flex Index, the share of Fortune 500 companies with full-time, five-day-a-week in-office mandates nearly doubled in the first half of 2025, a trend championed by giants like JPMorgan Chase, AT&T, and Amazon.

This rigid approach inflicts what is known as the “motherhood penalty” on a massive scale. Women, who still shoulder the lion’s share of caregiving, are left with an impossible choice: either struggle to meet the inflexible demands of an in-person schedule or quit. But this is not just a crisis for women; it is a profound act of corporate self-sabotage. A 2024 University of Pittsburgh analysis found that these aggressive return-to-office mandates have led to a mass “exodus of senior employees—many of them women,” a brain drain that directly threatens corporate productivity and competitiveness. In another survey, nearly two-thirds of C-suite executives admitted that their RTO mandates caused a “disproportionate number” of women to quit, and many of those same CEOs now report that they are struggling to fill those senior roles and that their overall productivity is suffering. It is a story of companies cutting off their nose to spite their face, all to satisfy an outdated and demonstrably inefficient model of work.

Part II: The Government’s War on Caregivers

This corporate backslide is being aided and abetted by a series of deliberate and destructive government policies that form a multi-front assault on the very infrastructure that allows mothers to work. The most direct blow was the end of federal pandemic-era childcare funding in September 2024. The loss of that aid has created a catastrophic collapse in the sector, forcing centers to close or raise tuition to unaffordable levels, leaving many families with no viable options.

This crisis is being actively worsened by the administration’s hardline immigration agenda. As the Time magazine report noted, the mass deportations occurring across the country are decimating the childcare workforce, in which an estimated 20% of providers are immigrants. This creates a vicious, cascading failure: the administration’s cruelty in one policy area directly fuels a crisis in another, making it even harder for mothers to find the care they need to remain in the workforce.

These policy failures are compounded by sweeping federal layoffs and the systematic dismantling of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. These stable, often more flexible, government jobs have historically been a crucial source of employment for women, and particularly for Black women, who are now being disproportionately harmed. The unemployment rate for Black women has climbed to its highest level in nearly four years.

Perhaps the most cynical aspect of this is the profound hypocrisy at its core. The administration and its political allies are publicly championing a “pro-natalist” agenda, calling for women to have more babies to reverse the nation’s declining birth rate. Yet, as economist Misty Lee Heggeness stated, the very policies they are implementing—forcing federal workers back to the office, gutting the childcare sector—are the “exact opposite of what you’d want to be doing… if you really care about increasing birth rates.” They are creating a society where women must choose between a career and a family, and then feigning surprise when an increasing number find it impossible to do both.

Part III: The Economic Fallout

This exodus of working mothers is not just a social or cultural tragedy; it is a national economic catastrophe in slow motion. The cost of this self-inflicted wound is staggering. As Sheryl Sandberg recently estimated, if women’s workforce participation in the U.S. simply matched the levels seen in our peer nations like Canada or Germany, 7 million more women could join the workforce, fueling up to 4.2% in additional economic growth. We are actively forfeiting trillions of dollars in potential GDP growth because we have made it unsustainable for mothers to work.

While this is a national problem, its effects are most visible not in the major coastal hubs, but in the mid-sized American cities that form the backbone of the country’s economy. Places like Greensboro, North Carolina, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, are on the front lines of this crisis. They are not just losing employees; they are losing taxpayers, homeowners, entrepreneurs, and consumers. As mothers are forced to leave jobs, local economies shrink, tax revenues drop, and the demand for goods and services declines. This is a slow hollowing out of the American heartland, a preventable crisis that is weakening the very foundation of community-based economic development.

A Preventable Crisis

The pandemic, for all its horrors, offered a brief, revolutionary glimpse of a different future for working mothers—a future of flexibility, respect, and a recognition that employees are whole human beings. That moment is over. As one mother, who now fears losing her remote work arrangement, heartbreakingly told a reporter, “‘There’s been a shift in the zeitgeist—now, it’s ‘We don’t care about you, and you’re replaceable.’ It’s like we didn’t learn anything.'”

This is a preventable crisis. The choice is clear. America can continue down the path of the “Ken-ergy economy,” allowing a combination of corporate intransigence and a backward-thinking political philosophy to push a generation of talented, experienced women out of the workforce. Or, it can finally choose to invest in the policies and infrastructure that have been proven to work in every other advanced economy: affordable childcare, flexible work arrangements, and paid family leave. The future of our nation’s productivity, equity, and prosperity depends on whether we finally recognize working mothers not just as caregivers, but as the essential drivers of our national economy that they are.