Priscila Kallfelz and her family — her partner, herself, and their two-year-old daughter — live in “a tiny apartment” in midtown Toronto. She’s been working as the member services manager at YWCA Canada from the dining table for a year now, averaging three or four meetings a day and sharing the makeshift dining and living room office with her husband. 

“I find that there’s no break, you know?” she says. “In a normal situation, whenever I’m exhausted or I need a break, I’ll just send her to the park with my husband or I’ll go for dinner with my friends, but these days, it’s the three of us, all the time, together, trying to find a way to survive this whole thing.”

Time on her own or with friends was a lifeline pre-pandemic. “Since I became a mom two years ago, I kind of lost myself a little bit.”

Still, Kallfelz acknowledges that she’s one of the lucky ones. Her daughter has been in daycare most of the pandemic. “I could not imagine having my daughter, Chloe, with us the whole time,” she says. “I really don’t know what life would have been.” 

She corrects herself, though — she does have an idea. Those three to four meetings a day are with team members at local YWCAs across the country, many of whom are working moms. “As expected, we hear kids in the background and some people will feel sorry,” she says, “And I’m like, ‘Don’t be sorry. You’re doing double, triple duty now. I’m glad you had the chance to call in.’” 

That double or triple duty is the reality for many women and gender-diverse people working in social purpose organizations across the country. According to pre-COVID-19 statistics, women made up 47 percent of the overall workforce in Canada, but 80 percent of the non-profit workforce. That number may have changed with the pandemic, though. Racialized women who lost their jobs at the beginning of the pandemic still have the highest rates of unemployment. And according to new research by RBC, almost 100,000 women have left the workforce completely (meaning they aren’t even applying for work at this point) since the pandemic began. That’s 10 times more than the number of men who’ve done the same. 

Women, particularly racialized and migrant women, are more likely to work in precarious industries hit hard by shutdowns and layoffs, like foodservice and hospitality, but the historic drop in labour force participation is also at least partially because of childcare. In a study of 4,000 working and stay-at-home parents, fathers reported a weekly average of 33 hours of childcare duties pre-pandemic and 46 hours during, while mothers reported 68 hours pre-pandemic and a jump to 95 hours during. 

Almost 100,000 women have left the workforce completely (meaning they aren’t even applying for work at this point) since the pandemic began.

And in the non-profit and social services world, mothers feel the strain acutely because of the increased workload during a social and economic crisis. “There is no way to balance things out,” says Kallfelz. Presenting the example of violence against women, an issue area YWCA Canada works on, she says, “we know that COVID has intensified everything…so there is definitely more work on our plate, more projects, more initiatives.”

Much of this work has been emotionally taxing: consulting people with lived experience and frontline workers in order to inform a national action plan on gender-based violence, due at the end of this month. “As a working mother, hosting those sessions and gathering all that feedback, and then shutting down my computer, making dinner, and trying to focus on the little one has been super challenging — not only from an energy point of view, but from an emotional point of view. It’s a whole lot to digest.” 

Herleen Arora has had somewhat of the opposite experience, but has felt her own, acute challenges. Most of the year was spent on maternity leave from her job as partnership development officer at the think tank Future Skills Centre. While she acknowledges that even having maternity leave is a privilege many new mothers don’t have, she found it difficult and lonely to be isolated during a time that’s usually filled with celebration and connection. She was also bored. Three months in, she started taking on consulting contracts with non-profits, doing research and evaluation work. “I needed mental stimulation,” she says. “I was going crazy, a little bit.” 

Both Kallfelz and Arora have male partners who are committed to taking on a fair share of domestic duties, but say they still find themselves taking on more childcare responsibilities.

Kallfelz says while day-to-day duties are divided equally, with her husband taking on more of the daily domestic duties because of his more flexible work schedule, she finds herself taking over when unexpected issues arise. For example, when her daughter is sent home from daycare with a runny nose, she’s typically the one to rearrange her day to take care of her. “When it comes to that, the burden is heavier on me. I am the planner of our house. I’m the one juggling.” 

Arora’s goal was to go back to work full time at Future Skills Centre in May, but she wasn’t able to find a spot for her daughter in daycare until September. This experience has reinforced for her how important, on a socioeconomic inclusion level, accessible childcare is. (The federal government has committed to creating a national childcare system, but there aren’t any details on when that might become a reality.) As of now, “there are a lot of factors you have to think through as a family,” she says, including whether childcare fits into the family budget in order for both parents to work full time.

The cost of childcare, along with rising grocery costs and other post-pandemic cost-of-living increases, concerns Kallfelz too. “This is a conversation my husband and I are having too. Do we need to be even more frugal with our expenses? We’re pretty tight right now.” The average non-profit worker in Canada makes about $32,000. A 2020 study found that families pay over $10,000 a year in childcare costs in 78 percent of 37 cities across the country.

Fathers reported a weekly average of 33 hours of childcare duties pre-pandemic and 46 hours during, while mothers reported 68 hours pre-pandemic and a jump to 95 hours during.

All of these barriers could set women’s gains back when it comes to career advancement. “Even if women split childcare duties evenly with a supportive partner (like mine),” writes Megan Frederickson, a University of Toronto researcher, “we are still competing with many men who do way less at home.

Frederickson studied the productivity of academic researchers during the pandemic and found that “the number of male preprint authors is currently growing faster than the number of female preprint authors. In other words, on average, women are not advancing their research as much as men during the pandemic.” Women across social purpose organizations are feeling similar effects. For example, one survey found that nearly half of Canadian women working in tech feel their career advancement opportunities are being limited by the pandemic, and that number tips over to 52 percent of those with children. 

Arora worries about what her time out of the workforce might do to her career advancement trajectory. “Watching my partner engage with work, get promoted, and get opportunities, and me trying to figure out what that might look like for me,” after time spent out of the sector, “has been mentally interesting. It’s been hard.”

She says motherhood and moving up the ladder might be incompatible with the ways many social purpose organizations operate now. “If some people are in leadership positions that require a lot of commitment (and little flexibility in hours), will that be difficult for women? It depends on their status, if they’re single moms, or caregivers, or if they have family support…but does it challenge women to even be in leadership roles? Absolutely.”

And that’s on top of the barriers many women and gender-diverse people already face in career development. “You keep hearing report upon report, whether it’s from the non-profit sector or the public sector, of certain demographics of women — racialized, Black, Indigenous women (being absent from) leadership spaces. Those are things that I aspire to…it’s really difficult to hear those things over and over again. And then throw in the reality of having a family, too.” 

Kalfellz says she’s working on creating space within the YWCA to acknowledge these kinds of systemic and daily struggles, especially in terms of how they’ve compounded during the pandemic.

“I really try to set a tone when I’m in meetings with other mothers to say, ‘Hey, it’s ok to be feeling the way you’re feeling,’” she says. “I find that if it’s more of a professional meeting or a bigger meeting where people don’t know each other, (mothers respond with,) ‘Oh, we’re just happy that we’re well and safe,’ while if it’s in a smaller group or people who know each other really well, it’s more like, ‘This just sucks. I can’t do this anymore. It’s just too much. I need to get out of here.’”

Kallfelz isn’t convinced these kinds of conversations are resulting in more flexibility for working parents in social impact organizations on a broad scale, though. “To be really honest, I think it depends on the culture of the organization or the leadership,” she says. “For organizations that are people-centred, I think these changes are happening and they’re happening fast…I still have the impression, mostly in the corporate world, that’s still not happening. It’s still all about meeting deadlines.” She says she sees this often in non-profits, too.

Kallfelz says the national YWCA team has started to talk about going back to the office, when it’s safe to do so. She says they’re likely to move to a “hybrid” schedule, where most employees would have the option to work from home a few days a week — which would massively help her balance life at home with her daughter and the professional work she cares deeply about.

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