Women report greater work-and-family strain while raising children and more emotional and financial costs when helping aging relatives, according to a Pew Research Center analysis that also tracks persistent gaps in pay and unpaid work.
The report released Thursday examines women’s employment and caregiving from raising children to helping aging relatives. The report brings together national surveys and government data from several years, rather than presenting a single new October survey.
Among full-time working parents surveyed March 2-15, 2026, 67% of mothers and 50% of fathers said juggling work and family kept them from giving their all at home in the previous year. Fifty-six percent of mothers and 38% of fathers also said balancing those responsibilities kept them from giving their all at work. Fifty-two percent of mothers said parenthood made career advancement harder, compared with 38% of fathers.
Majorities of full-time working mothers and fathers said they at least sometimes handle parenting tasks at work or work tasks while with their children. About half said their job made it harder to be a good parent, with mothers more likely to report those difficulties.
Earnings and unpaid work
Women’s participation in the U.S. labor force remains below men’s. Among parents with children younger than 18, 74% of women and 94% of men were working or looking for work in 2025, according to the report. Across adults overall, the participation gap was 9 percentage points.
Women earned 86 cents for each dollar earned by men in median hourly pay in 2025. That calculation includes full- and part-time workers with positive earnings and excludes the self-employed. The gap narrowed substantially from the early 1980s until about 2000, then changed relatively little.
The report also examined age cohorts. Women ages 25-34 in 2015 earned 90% of what men their age earned; by 2025, that cohort’s earnings were 85% of men’s. Those comparisons use repeated population surveys, rather than tracking the same individuals for a decade.
Women’s economic role within marriages has grown. In 2022, 29% of different-sex marriages involving adults ages 25-64 had spouses earning roughly equal amounts, defined as each providing 40% to 60% of the couple’s earnings. Wives were the sole or primary earner in 16%, with primary earners supplying more than 60%. Both shares roughly tripled over about 50 years.
Equal earnings did not produce an equal division of unpaid work. Time-use data from 2016-21 showed wives in equal-earning marriages averaging 6.9 hours of caregiving and 4.6 hours of housework weekly, compared with husbands’ 5.1 hours and 1.9 hours. Husbands averaged 25.2 hours of leisure, compared with wives’ 21.6.
A January 2023 survey found 57% of adults thought society valued men’s contributions at work more than those at home. Twenty percent said the same about women.
Remote work and benefits
Working from home did not correspond to a large difference in how parents described the balancing act in the March 2026 survey. Fifty-two percent of parents working remotely all or most of the time said balancing work and family was difficult, compared with 54% working remotely sometimes and 54% working remotely rarely or never.
Among all working parents, 84% said paid parental, family or medical leave would be extremely or very helpful, while 50% said it was available at their job. Parents also reported gaps between the usefulness and availability of flexible hours, flexibility about where to work and workplace child care.
For New York workers, the state’s Paid Family Leave program provides eligible employees up to 12 weeks of job-protected paid leave for qualifying family events. Benefits equal 67% of a worker’s average weekly wage, capped at 67% of the statewide average weekly wage.
Eligibility rules cover most private-sector employees working in New York after a waiting period: 26 consecutive weeks for those regularly working at least 20 hours weekly, or 175 days worked for those regularly working fewer hours. Public employers can opt into coverage, including through collective bargaining.
Support continues after children grow up
In a survey conducted Oct. 24-Nov. 5, 2023, 41% of parents with children ages 18-34 said their young adult child relied on them a great deal or a fair amount for emotional support. Fifty-nine percent said they had helped their adult children financially during the preceding year.
For the emotional-support question, parents with multiple children in that age range answered about one randomly selected child. The financial-help measure concerned their adult children more broadly.
Mothers were more likely than fathers to have frequent contact with young adult children living away from home. Eighty-one percent of mothers and 63% of fathers reported texting at least a few times a week; 61% and 46%, respectively, reported phone or video conversations that often. Parents with multiple eligible children answered the contact questions about the child they communicated with most often.
Caring for aging relatives
A survey conducted Sept. 2-8, 2025, found that 28% of women and 23% of men with a parent, spouse or partner age 65 or older considered themselves that person’s caregiver.
Among full-time workers helping an aging parent, 40% of women and 22% of men said doing so hurt their emotional well-being. The figures were 20% and 9% for physical health, and 36% and 22% for finances.
Women caring for an aging spouse or partner also reported negative effects more often than men. Thirty-three percent cited emotional effects, compared with 16% of men; 29% cited harm to their social life, compared with 15%; and 20% cited financial effects, compared with 9%. Those spouse-caregiver figures include people across employment situations.
Caregiving also brought benefits. Majorities of working men and women helping aging parents said it strengthened their relationship with that parent.
Among caregivers for aging parents, spouses or partners, 77% supported federal tax credits for caregiving expenses, 73% supported paying for short-term care to give family caregivers a break, 67% favored requiring employer-provided paid family leave and 66% favored direct payments toward care costs.
How the surveys were conducted
The March 2026 study surveyed 2,242 parents working full or part time who had children younger than 18. It combined Pew’s American Trends Panel with an SSRS Opinion Panel supplement. The September 2025 survey included 8,750 U.S. adults, and the 2023 parent survey included 3,017 parents of young adults.
Those probability-based surveys were weighted to represent their respective populations. Their full-sample margins of error were 2.6, 1.4 and 2.5 percentage points, respectively; margins for the smaller groups of mothers, fathers and caregivers are larger. Employment and earnings estimates came from the Current Population Survey, while unpaid-work comparisons used the American Time Use Survey.
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