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In early 2025, more than 212,000 women left the U.S. workforce following a rise in return-to-office mandates, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Among mothers with young children, workforce participation dropped nearly three percentage points in just six months, according to the BLS. Behind those numbers is a larger story: Businesses are losing talent because they continue to treat caregiving as a liability rather than an asset. Many women still shoulder more caregiving responsibilities compared with men, and their careers get double penalized. This first occurs when they step back to care. Additionally, almost all women (not just caregivers) face what has been called the “maybe baby” bias, where women specifically are seen as risks for potentially deciding to have a child and then taking leave or working reduced hours in the future. Women who do leave the workplace for a time after childbirth lose again when they return to jobs that fail to recognize their newfound skills and value after a gap in their work histories.
Yet caregiving cultivates the very abilities many employers say they need most right now: empathy, problem-solving, adaptability, and leadership under pressure. The takeaway is clear: Retaining your caregiver employees isn’t just good for equity and morale; it’s advantageous to your organization. Studies show that organizations with a higher representation of women have lower turnover, stronger team performance, and greater profitability. For example, moving from no female leaders to 30% female representation in top roles is associated with a gain of roughly 1 percentage point in net profit margin, which is equivalent to about a 15% increase in profitability for a typical company.
Our Research: Caregiving Builds Core Workforce Skills
At the Rutgers Center for Women in Business, we set out to investigate not why business should invest in caregivers but how caregiver employees benefit businesses.
In 2023, we surveyed 131 caregivers and found that the skills gained from their caregiving experiences made them better in their paid work through improvements in key competencies as varied as conflict resolution, time management, and strategic foresight. From the data, we identified 18 discrete caregiving-honed skills that we then clustered into three domains:
- Humanity: Empathy, emotional intelligence, and collaboration.
- Productivity: Efficiency, persistence, and time management.
- Cognitivity: Anticipating needs, multitasking, and managing complexity.
The response to the 2023 research was overwhelmingly positive. We received feedback from professionals across industries explaining that, for years, they’ve had to hide their caregiving work because of employers’ negative perceptions. The prevailing narrative is that caregivers suck time and resources from the workplace. Our data upends that assumption.
To validate these findings from the employer perspective, we recently conducted a semantic embedding analysis to triangulate the data we’d collected in 2023. We mapped the 18 skills to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 17 core workplace skills, which represent the general human capacities most valued across occupations. Adaptability, critical thinking, interpersonal communication, leadership, and detail orientation are among those skill categories.
Importantly, these skills are grounded in employer-oriented data: The BLS assigns importance ratings to each skill per occupation (reflecting what employers report as required for those jobs). We found that caregiving skills covered 76.5% of workforce skills and achieved 100% overlap with the top three skills in demand across all occupations: adaptability, interpersonal communication, and detail orientation. (See “Similarities in Caregiving and Core Workplace Skills: A Heat Map.”)
When we looked specifically at management occupations, caregiving skills had 100% coverage across all leadership competencies and complete overlap with the BLS’s top managerial skill priorities: adaptability, problem-solving, decision-making, and leadership.
Together, our findings reveal that caregiving cultivates the same adaptive, interpersonal, and organizational capabilities that are central to effective management and leadership.
How Employers Can Reframe Caregiving
As the data shows, caregiving isn’t a career detour; it’s a form of leadership training. In an era of AI and automation, caregiving builds the human capabilities machines can’t replicate. This means that leaders and employers need to revisit how they think about caregivers and caregiving and prioritize these actions:
1. Name the skills out loud. Track and translate caregiving contributions into resume language, performance reviews, and leadership frameworks. Despite their high value, skills like humanity, productivity, and cognitivity remain largely overlooked in organizational contexts and may even be downgraded as soft skills. When such skills are left unrecognized, it perpetuates inequities and missed opportunities for organizations.
2. Stop penalizing career breaks. Research in India showed that women who take career breaks receive 49% fewer callbacks than applicants who do not. This is a costly loss of talent. Parental leave and other caregiving leaves are not resume gaps; they are periods of real-world leadership skills development.
Notably, fewer than half of eligible U.S. men take paid parental leave, often because time away from work is penalized in performance reviews and because offering leave to fathers is still seen as optional. If society stopped penalizing career breaks, more men could take extended caregiving leave and thus more women could return to work without stigma. “Returnship” programs (where employers recruit and develop people looking to restart their careers) can also help reintegrate highly skilled workers who paused their careers to provide care.
As Brett Hemmerling, vice president and global head of Early Careers and Programs Talent Attraction at Moody’s, explained, “If employers are stuck looking only at career trajectories and see gaps as negatives, they’re missing the skills and experiences cultivated within those gaps. Relocating a family, for example, is project management. Managing caregiving demands requires adaptability and resilience managers find appealing.”
Ultimately, leadership pipelines must evolve to recognize that there is more than one path to the top. Increasingly, research on workforce development is emphasizing a skills-first approach rather than focusing on credentials or linear experience alone. But leaders who can translate their nonlinear experiences to their jobs are often better equipped for the complexity of modern business.
3. Revisit policies. Policy matters to your talent and your organizational success: Paid leave, flexible work schedules, and caregiving support are essentials for both women and men. As Caitlin Freeland, vice president of inclusion and culture at Bristol-Myers Squibb, observed, “Organizations that overlook caregiving are missing a major growth opportunity.” Her team is developing a new inclusion strategy that recognizes caregiving as an untapped asset. She noted that policies like flexible work arrangements enable employees to bring their whole selves to work rather than having to compartmentalize professional and caregiving roles.
Research shows that flexible scheduling practices are among the top factors influencing employee retention — highlighting how structural work policies intersect directly with caregiving demands. Encouraging men to use options such as scheduling flexibility further builds humanity, productivity, and cognitivity skills while helping to diminish the bias toward women and reduce the motherhood penalty (with regard to hiring, starting salaries, and perceived competence). When these policies are visibly supported and widely adopted, they create a virtuous cycle of cultural acceptance and stronger equity outcomes.
4. Double down on human skills. According to our data analysis, caregiving skills do not map strongly onto the few categories where AI is advancing fastest, such as math, mechanical skills, and certain technical domains. In other words, caregiving develops the very human, adaptive, and relational skills that machines cannot replicate, which will be the most critical skills for the future workforce. AI transforms work processes and technical work, but empathy, foresight, and resilience — the hallmarks of caregiving — are the ultimate competitive edge for organizations in 2026 and beyond.
Implications for Organizations
Caregiving helps people develop leadership and crisis management skills, and it’s also a master class in adaptability, collaboration, and foresight. Companies that continue to treat caregiving as a career gap risk losing high-value employees and missing a powerful lever for organizational innovation and talent retention.
The organizations that will win in the next decade are those that stop penalizing caregiving and start regarding caregivers as people with one of the most competitive skill sets in the modern workforce.