.jpg)
After the birth of her first child, Lindsay Thomas returned to her full-time, in-office communications role in medical research. But when her second child arrived in 2024, she knew she couldn't—or wouldn't—repeat that juggling act. So she negotiated something different: a part-time, remote version of her role, working anywhere from 2 to 40 hours a month, and began supplementing with freelance projects.
Now, when a child falls ill and Thomas spends the night awake, she isn't spiraling about missed meetings or commuting stress. She's home, with the flexibility to shape her day around her family's needs. "There are costs to everything," she says. "The cost to our family, the cost to the stress levels, to mental health… that was just a cost we didn't want to absorb." Had freelancing not been an option, Thomas says she would have left the workforce entirely—even though she never pictured herself as a stay-at-home parent.
Thomas's story reflects a broader, unsettling shift. After gaining ground during the pandemic, women are sliding backward out of the labor force. The number of working mothers aged 25 to 44 with young children fell nearly 3% between January and June of last year, hitting its lowest point in over three years, according to a *Washington Post* analysis. In December alone, 91,000 women over 20 exited the workforce—even as employment for men in the same age group rose by 10,000, per data from the National Women's Law Center.
Converging Pressures: AI, Return-to-Office, and Caregiving
Multiple forces are converging to push women—especially mothers—toward the margins of traditional employment.
A March report from Anthropic found that workers in roles highly exposed to AI automation are 16% more likely to be female, placing women at greater risk of displacement. Simultaneously, a wave of return-to-office mandates is forcing parents to choose between commutes and carpools. And after years of mass layoffs, workplace loyalty and job security have eroded, making the search for stable employment more precarious.
The math remains stubbornly unequal: women earn, on average, 85 cents for every dollar men make, while shouldering roughly twice the domestic labor and caregiving responsibilities at home. "The real friction is we just haven't built systems that allow people to integrate their work and their lives and their desires and what they want their life to look like," says Brea Starmer, CEO of Lions and Tigers, a staffing firm specializing in fractional workers. "For anyone that doesn't fit this very specific narrow look and feel and mold, there is just not a lot of options."
In this climate, freelancing isn't just a side hustle—it's a strategy for reclaiming agency. And as AI reshapes what companies need and how many hours they require, employers are increasingly open to hiring part-time and contract talent.
Flexibility Has a Price
The pandemic proved that remote, flexible work benefited parents—particularly mothers. As of 2023, 74% of mothers were employed, up from 72% in 2019, according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research. Yet many corporate leaders have dismissed the trade-offs women face. An Upwork survey found that more than half of executives reported losing a disproportionate number of women after implementing return-to-office policies. Turnover among female employees at these companies reached 82%—significantly higher than at firms allowing remote work. Nearly one-third of women freelancers cited RTO mandates as a direct reason for leaving full-time roles.
Meanwhile, 42% of women who voluntarily left the workforce in 2025 pointed to caregiving and childcare costs as their primary reason—and these women were more likely to work at companies without flexible scheduling options, per a Catalyst survey.
Paradoxically, as employers resist adapting to family needs, they're recognizing the value of freelance talent. A fall survey of roughly 350 business leaders by Upwork found that 77% believe AI is increasing demand for fractional, specialized freelance workers. "Historically, business leaders were maybe a little more hesitant to embrace these kinds of non-traditional work models," says Gabby Burlacu of the Upwork Research Institute. "Now, they're far more open to working with the most skilled talent they can find—especially AI-enabled talent—as they figure out how to unlock the value of this technology."
The Freelance Reality: Autonomy, But Not Without Sacrifice
Freelancing offers autonomy, but it often requires choosing among imperfect paths.
Jaime Hollander once commuted three to four hours daily into Manhattan while freelancing on the side and splitting childcare equally with her husband. After her father's death in 2019, she reevaluated. "You have those moments of reckoning where you're like, this can't be all that there is," she says. She scaled back, then quit her job entirely to focus on freelance marketing and copywriting. But full-time freelancing brought a new challenge: she became "the default parent," on call for her children's needs throughout the day. "If something has to get done between 7 and 7, I will do it," she says. "Sometimes, it's really challenging."
Paid parental leave has expanded, yet only 40% of U.S. companies offered it as of 2023, per the Society for Human Resource Management. And even generous leave policies don't address the ongoing flexibility parents need as children grow—through sick days, special needs, school involvement, and beyond. "It's not just about retaining women in those early years," says Neha Ruch, author of *The Power Pause*. "There is recalibration happening" in the workforce, with more women pursuing fractional, part-time, or freelance work. Retaining women, she argues, requires "thinking about parenting through the longitudinal experience of early parenthood… going all the way up to college admissions and how the demands that are made within the system on parents' time can work in the ecosystem of the professional space as well."
For many, the shift to freelance isn't triggered by a new baby, but by evolving family demands. When Erin Bartholomew's son was born, her husband stayed home. Years later, she took her turn, wanting hands-on time while he was young. She reentered the workforce remotely, logging on at 6 a.m. in Oregon for a marketing role with an East Coast company. After being laid off in 2024, she launched her own marketing consultancy. "It's so night and day," Bartholomew says. "It's allowed that balance that my husband and I really wanted."
Who Gets Left Behind?
Freelancing isn't a universal solution. Workers in roles requiring in-person presence—education, retail, healthcare, or offices with strict 9-to-5 mandates—often can't set their own schedules. Sole breadwinners who rely on employer-sponsored health insurance may not afford to go part-time. For others, childcare costs simply exceed potential earnings, making staying home the only viable option.
Leaving full-time work can also stall career momentum and reduce retirement contributions. If companies don't modernize scheduling, embrace remote flexibility, or future-proof roles against AI disruption, many women won't see going part-time as a choice—but as a constraint they cannot escape.
As Lindsay Thomas puts it: "There are costs to everything." The question isn't whether trade-offs exist—it's whether our workplaces, policies, and cultural expectations will evolve to ensure those costs aren't borne disproportionately by the people who keep both families and economies running.