LinkedIn is adding ‘stay-at-home mom’ and more caretaker titles, as 2.3 million women leave the workforce
A year into the pandemic that has decimated working women, "we need to normalize employment gaps" on LinkedIn's public resumes
Source | fortune-com.cdn.ampproject.org | MARIA ASPAN
For years, mothers who’ve temporarily stopped working have asked LinkedIn for more ways to reflect a caregiving hiatus on their public, digital resumes.
Now they’re finally getting some better options. On Tuesday, the Microsoft-owned professional social network is introducing several new job titles, including “stay-at-home mom,” to allow full-time parents and other caretakers to provide more accurate descriptions of their time away from the paid labor force. LinkedIn is also removing its requirement that any resume entry—for example, “stay-at-home dad”—must be linked to a specific company or employer.
LinkedIn made these changes after Fortune asked for comment, earlier this month, on a Medium post criticizing the social network’s lack of flexible language or profile options for women who leave the labor force. More than 2.3 million women have done so in the past year alone, as the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools and daycares and decimated the service-oriented businesses that employ majority-female workforces.
