>The drop brought the share of working moms of young kids to its lowest level since 2022. That’s a massive decline, but you won’t find it referenced in the Bure

>The drop brought the share of working moms of young kids to its lowest level since 2022. That’s a massive decline, but you won’t find it referenced in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly jobs report. The figure comes from analysis done by University of Kansas professor Misty Heggeness, a one-time economist at the Census Bureau, and measures what she calls a “girly statistic.” The thesis is that BLS—and the US federal government writ large—should measure and pay attention to these kind of things: >We would all have a better grasp of the value of the care economy if we paid attention to those pesky girly statistics. One study that Heggeness cites found that unpaid care work in the US in 2020 was valued at $5.3 trillion, or about 25% of the GDP. “The economy we do measure does not function without this underbelly of unpaid care work,” she wrote in a 2023 paper that calls for a more wholistic definition of economic activity. Of course, issues with GDP are larger than just the author's specific point in this opinion piece, but it starts with measurement.