During Women’s History Month, we celebrate the contributions that women have made to every corner of our society and honor their achievements. Among these leaders are the more than 5 million women who form the backbone of home-based child care (HBCC).
These women are leading and sustaining a child care system that supports our communities. While less frequently thought of than child care centers, HBCC is a preferred choice for millions of families, with nearly 6.5 million children ages 0-5 receiving care in a home-based setting. This sector is almost entirely powered by women— 97% of providers are women, and nearly half are women of color.
These women provide child care that is more than just a service. It offers cultural connection, nurtures child development, and creates the flexible support that working families depend on. Despite their important work, home-based child care providers are often overworked and severely underpaid.
Home-based providers offer essential care during normal business hours, late evenings, weekends, and overnight shifts. Supporting the community in this way means that providers frequently manage workdays that far exceed a standard shift. These caregivers provide an average of 10-12 hours of care each day, with 82% of providers working over 50 hours per week.
Despite these long hours, compensation remains far below the value they provide. The average annual income for a licensed child care provider is just $29,377. A survey by the National Association of Family Child Care even found that nearly 30% of respondents earned between $7 and $10 per hour, with 50% earning below $15 per hour.
“At the end of the day, I am both the CEO and the janitor for my business. I’m also the cook, the curriculum specialist, and the tax preparer. I have a master’s degree and run a five-star program, but after all the expenses I average about $14 an hour.”
– Shalicia Jackson, Family Child Care Provider
But these low wages aren’t random. They are rooted in a long history of viewing women’s work as “lesser” – a legacy that unfortunately continues to impact HBCC providers.
This historical narrative has long categorized care work as a woman’s ‘labor of love’ rather than a skilled profession, creating a systemic devaluation of women’s work. These gender stereotypes, persistent throughout U.S. history, have labeled domestic roles, especially child care jobs, as “women’s work” – tasks performed out of love and “motherly instinct” and therefore rarely regarded as labor that requires skills and professional pay.
This devaluation is also deeply racialized. For centuries, paid domestic work and child-rearing were viewed as the domain of women of color, as those were some of the few occupations available to them in the decades following the Civil War. These women were expected to provide care for white families for little to no pay, an expectation that has carried into the low wages experienced by child care workers today.
But it’s not just the child care sector that reflects low wages. Women-dominated industries at large are under-valued, leading to lower wages compared to male-dominated industries, even when requiring similar skill levels. This is evident in the current gender wage gap, in which women in the U.S. who work full time are typically paid only 81 cents for every dollar paid to men, with that figure being lower for women of color.
This year’s Women’s History Month theme, “Leading the Change: Women Shaping a Sustainable Future,” expands our understanding of sustainability beyond just environmental concerns. It encompasses financial sustainability, community resilience, and intergenerational equity.
In the home-based child care sector, women are key to shaping sustainable futures. They sustain families in their communities by offering quality, personalized child care. They shape future generations in their homes. Their work allows parents, especially those who work nontraditional hours, to sustain their own careers.
But the HBCC system cannot be sustainable if the people upholding it continue to be undervalued and underpaid.
In order for these women to continue shaping a sustainable child care system that benefits all of us, we must invest in this workforce itself – valuing HBCC as essential infrastructure and supporting the women who have historically and are currently providing critical learning and care to children in our communities.
