Jennifer Barnhill is a columnist for Military.com writing about military families.
The steady military spouse 21% unemployment rate somehow still makes headlines despite being a documented problem since the 1970s. We don’t often read about the 36% of military spouses who are out of the workforce entirely. The often-ignored truth is that military spouses are out of the workforce at statistically higher rates than their civilian counterparts, but no one talks about it because it is seen as a “choice.”
Army spouse Elizabeth Mays was relieved that her husband was going to be able to be there for the birth of their child. He was about to deploy, so they knew there was no guarantee he would be able to be there for this important family moment. But her relief was short-lived when she started to sort through the logistics of staying in the workforce herself.
“We did the math, and I would be paying them $50 a week essentially to work there,” given child care costs, said Mays. “And so that was a decision. It just doesn’t make sense. I’m going to have a newborn. I’m going to be commuting an hour. … It was five years later that I looked to reenter the workforce.”
Although the Mays family weighed their options and Elizabeth “chose” to exit the workforce, her story highlights a level of nuance about the decisions military spouses make that the military community often glazes over.
“When we talked to military spouses, they kind of felt like they…
