The School Break Effect: Temporary Caregiving Constraints and Female Employment

This paper studies how temporary spikes in caregiving demands affect women’s labor market outcomes in developing countries. We focus on the school break period in Colombia, which intensifies unpaid care responsibilities that fall disproportionately on women. Using high-frequency household survey data from 2008 to 2019, we show that women’s labor force participation drops by 2 percentage points during school breaks, a decline equivalent to one-third of the drop observed during the COVID-19 crisis. This effect is entirely concentrated among informal workers and is especially pronounced for mothers of young children and married women. These findings underscore how even short-term caregiving shocks can significantly disrupt women’s attachment to the labor market in settings where flexibility is prevalent but closely tied to job precarity.