On average, the seasonally adjusted number of unemployed U.S. women aged 25 to 54 in 2025 rose by more than 120,000 year-over-year, after increasing by just over 250,000 from 2023 to 2024. Catalyst reports that 42% of women who resigned cited caregiving responsibilities, including the cost of child care, as the primary reason for their resignation.
The drop coincided with a wave of return-to-office (RTO) mandates from major employers intent on bringing workers back on-site, regardless of the impact. Flexible work policies allowed many mothers to stay employed while navigating school pickups, medical appointments and the unpredictable demands of raising children. When mandates took effect, those gains began to erode.
RTO Rising
Google recently revised its “work from anywhere” policy so that one remote day counts as an entire week against an employee’s annual limit. Amazon now expects corporate workers to be in the office five days a week – as do Dell, AT&T and Samsung. Microsoft requires three days as of February. Across industries, employers are tightening policies that only months earlier had helped millions balance work and family responsibilities.
Companies cite collaboration, culture and productivity as reasons for the shift. Yet research from McKinsey shows that caregivers required to work on-site are more likely to consider leaving. This pattern holds for both men and women. When employers remove flexibility, they lose the people who rely on it most.
At Sparrow, we are watching the effects play out in real time. Organizations that operated remotely for years are finding that employees built entire lives around that structure. Employees have taken on new caregiving duties or arranged child care around hybrid and remote work schedules. Many have chosen to leave.
More Workers Using Leave to Preserve Flexibility
Beyond resignations, we are seeing an increase in disability and caregiving leave requests as employees seek ways to maintain remote or hybrid schedules in accordance with company policy. Our analysis of millions of days of leave and the associated policies revealed that caregiving leave claims have surged by 150% in the five years ending in 2025. Moreover, the average length of caregiving leave has nearly quadrupled to 49.5 days over the same period.
And leave requests reach well beyond parents of young children. Employees caught in the “sandwich generation” – balancing the needs of aging parents alongside their own families – are finding that the loss of flexibility stretches their capacity to a breaking point. Research led by the National Alliance for Caregiving and the AARP found that approximately 16 million Americans are sandwich generation caregivers.
Leave administration requires time and resources. It disrupts team workflows and often signals deeper dissatisfaction that can lead to turnover. Meanwhile, competitors that maintain flexible policies are recruiting high performers frustrated by rigid requirements.
Dealing with the Legal Landscape for Leaves
Workers are also seeking to preserve the flexibility they need through legal means, increasingly invoking job‑protected leave, intermittent leave rights, and accommodation processes as the only dependable mechanisms left to manage work and caregiving obligations under tightened RTO policies, further adding to the crisis now faced by employers.
Employee leave administration now sits at the center of a vast, fragmented legal framework. In January 2025, the U.S. Department of Labor issued guidance outlining how the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) interacts with state paid family and medical leave programs. It clarified that when an employee is on FMLA and simultaneously receiving state-paid family and medical leave (PFML) benefits, employers generally may not require the concurrent use of employer‑provided paid time off, reversing common practices and complicating multi‑state coordination. At the same time, the number of jurisdictions with PFML continues to grow beyond the 14 states and the District of Columbia that already offer such programs, each with distinct funding, eligibility, and job‑protection rules, meaning policy choices in one state can’t simply be copied and pasted to another. Layer onto that the FMLA’s strict accounting rules for intermittent leave, and the risk of mis‑calculation, mis‑designation, or interference claims rises quickly. Finally, new and proposed federal and state provisions – like “safe leave” expansions and the evolving FAMILY Act proposal – continue to shift definitions, increments, and coordination requirements, raising both compliance and litigation exposure.
Just these few federal and state examples illustrate that the backlash from RTO mandates is exacerbating the increasingly challenging and complex compliance environment in which companies must operate.
The Math Does Not Work
Organizations often defend RTO mandates as necessary for culture and collaboration. But the data suggest these mandates sacrifice long-term workforce stability for short-term control.
Institutional knowledge is lost when experienced people resign, and productivity suffers long before caregivers quit. Organizations viewing office attendance as a proxy for productivity risk talent flight, diminished morale and operational disruption.
The workplace flexibility ushered in by COVID-19 enabled millions of employees to continue working. RTO math doesn’t add up because subtracting the same flexibility doesn’t equal or exceed the pre-pandemic “normal.” It creates a new crisis in which employer costs for inflexible, in-person workplace attendance and scheduling will be greater than the cost of the flexibility they seek to eliminate.
Rethinking RTO
Companies that want to retain and attract talent should approach return-to-office decisions by evaluating which roles truly require in-person work, offering flexibility where possible and investing in child care and leave benefits that support employees’ professional and personal obligations.
Additionally, employers should invest in infrastructure that supports sustainable work for caregivers. That includes subsidized or on-site child care, backup care programs for emergencies and paid family leave that exceeds federal and state minimums. It also includes management training to evaluate performance based on results rather than visibility, which benefits all employees, not just parents and caregivers.
Survey data from 3,000 U.S. professionals in the FlexJobs 2025 State of the Workforce Report show that 76% would look for a new job if no longer allowed to work remotely, up nearly 20% from 2024. For career decisions, remote work and flexible scheduling were ranked ahead of health insurance benefits, paid vacation, sick time, and advancement opportunities in the report.
Thousands and thousands of valuable employees are walking away or are on their way out, taking their experience with them. Employers must decide whether RTO mandates are worth the cost.
Deborah Hanus is CEO of Sparrow.
