The Caregiving Crisis Upon Us
It is overwhelmingly women who bear the brunt of this crisis.
Cyber Monday. Giving Tuesday. If you’re reading this, you’ve made it to Wednesday – just another day in the spending frenzy that is December as Americans buy gifts for those they care about. But, for too many in America right now, this holiday season is hardly about the art of care and joy of giving. Not when the cost of caregiving itself is a national crisis.
On the eve of Thanksgiving, New York Times columnist Michelle Cottle published a searing essay on her own journey caring for her aging parents—a “chaotic spectacle that was part harrowing medical drama, part sitcom.” She acknowledged hers is a relatively “easy lift compared with many other families”—those with financial constraints, limited support networks, and inflexible jobs that are unrelenting in the demands made of already overworked employees.
It is overwhelmingly women, not surprisingly, who bear the brunt of this crisis. Nearly half million women have left the workforce since January, one of the steepest declines in recent history according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Caregivers are an “unseen workforce,” devoting themselves in full to managing the lives of children and aging parents.
The need for policy intervention is dire. As a candidate in 2024, President Donald Trump promised a tax credit for family caregivers. And yet the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” he signed this summer did zero to address this community—and likely made the lives of most caregivers exponentially more fraught in the face of massive cuts to Medicaid. According to a report by Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, “nearly half of all states are on the brink of a caregiving emergency,” with the worst conditions concentrated in the deep South. Caregiving in the US, published in July by the AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving, reveals a devastating reality for caregivers forced to sacrifice their own physical and mental health and financial stability.
Just in time for the holiday season, a new public awareness campaign, Out of Office for Care, is shining a light on this reality. Launched by the national coalition Paid Leave For All, employees are encouraged to set their “OOO” automated email replies to accurately reflect the myriad care responsibilities that pull them away from work and share those messages on social media.
Workers from all industries—artists to lawyers, nonprofit leaders to small-business owners— have been giving the country an unfiltered look at why they step away from work and what it costs to do so without paid leave. As I wrote for Ms. magazine, “People across the country are setting their out-of-office messages and finally saying the quiet part out loud: they’re stepping away to care,” said Dawn Huckelbridge, founding director of Paid Leave for All. “They’re sharing these messages publicly to make plain the caregiving that shapes our lives. While many of these messages have some humor, they remind us that care is the backbone of this country, and that it’s past time the U.S. passed paid leave. Too many of us don’t have an ‘out of office,’ or any paid time to care.”
OOO replies making the rounds range from clever to catastrophic, revealing a workforce barely hanging on by a thread—and a policy landscape that hasn’t caught up.
“Thanks for your note! I’m OOO because my parents are getting older and I can’t manage their RX and 500 unread emails at once. In-home care is $60K and I have limited PTO. WiIl get back to you ASAP!
“Hi, sorry to miss you! I’m OOO because I just gave birth, but like 1 in 4 women in the U.S. I’ll be back at work in a couple weeks.”
“Greetings, I’m OOO hosting Thanksgiving with an ovarian cyst and a fibroid while solo-parenting because my husband’s on a 72-hour shift as a firefighter. This isn’t a vacation, it’s unpaid labor. Congress, pass paid leave or get out of office yourselves.”
It is an admittedly jarring sight: a string of OOO messages transforming inboxes into an indictment, a snapshot of the care work that keeps families afloat. As the business website Fast Company reported, “Out-of-office messages tend to be generic and polite. Some companies even mandate what employees post…. [But these messages] obscure the real story of workers’ lives.”
As women point to burnout, the cost of child care, and lack of access to paid family and medical leave as defining pressures—all while our nation’s lawmakers continue to enjoy full paid time off—Out of Office for Care has sparked a much-needed national conversation about the limited few who have time and resources to care and the vast majority who do not. All messages gathered throughout the campaign will be delivered to Congress by Paid Leave for All this month.
Make no mistake: Care is more than a niche or feminist issue. It is a community value, integral to a functioning democracy in the most basic of ways. Care is the truest expression of what and who we as a society value.
Among some of the excellent organizations tackling these issues and providing direct services are Mothering Justice, United for Respect, A Better Balance, and I Support the Girls, all of which are worthy of Contrarians’ support.
Jennifer Weiss-Wolf is executive director of the Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center at NYU School of Law. She also leads strategy and partnerships at Ms. Magazine.
 | A guest post by
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This post is mixing up two different issues, related as they may be. The fact that it's women who perform the caregiving may be a primary reason such labor is uncompensated. But that's not why it's unfair to caregivers to leave them with such few options. I'm now approaching 80, but a severe case of post-polio syndrome means that my wife needs me to do all the household work and see that she's well fed, happy and comfortable. I've been doing this for over ten years, and it sure would be nice to have more financial support and some respite options. The fact that I'm a man and my wife is a woman is irrelevant to the need.
Our country has been benefiting from the free labor of women forever. To make matters worse, that work was often unappreciated and taken for granted. Now, even Japanese women are saying, wait a minute, this is wrong.