Women Are Telling the Truth in Their Out-of-Office Messages. It’s Devastating

This year, working women across the U.S. hit a breaking point. More than 450,000 have left the workforce since January—one of the sharpest declines in recent history, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And, overwhelmingly, the women most likely to walk away are mothers with young children.

The forces pushing women out of their jobs aren’t mysterious. They’re the same ones that have been building for years: childcare that’s both unaffordable and hard to secure, workplaces pulling back on flexibility, and the reality that the U.S. remains the only developed country without national paid leave. While millions more women are still clocking in each day, the strain of holding everything together is getting harder to hide.

Which is why today, some of them are finally saying so out loud. Not in op-eds or protests, but in their out-of-office replies.

Workers across industries will be updating their auto-replies and flooding social media with screenshots of their real OOO reasons. Instead of “Offline for the long weekend,” inboxes will be lighting up with sick toddlers, hospice updates, and the everyday chaos women usually gloss over in polite auto-replies.

It’s all part of “Out of Office for Care,” a coordinated national action organized by the Paid Leave for All campaign. Marie Claire was provided several of these messages ahead of today’s launch.

The idea is simple: set your real OOO, screenshot it, and share it. Throughout the day, the organization will be pulling those posts into a sprawling “Digital Wall of Care,” appearing everywhere from Instagram feeds to airport screens in D.C. and New York to billboards in Times Square. Every message gathered will ultimately be delivered to Congress.

At the center of the effort is Dawn Huckelbridge, the founding director of Paid Leave for All, who says the campaign grew out of a frustration that has been building.

“It’s just the sense of exasperation that this has been unsustainable for so long, and it’s getting worse,” she tells Marie Claire. “So many of us are caring not just for children, but for multiple family members and for ourselves. Without simple policies like paid leave, it’s burning us at both ends.”

The idea for the OOO messages struck her team as Thanksgiving approached and the latest jobs data came out. It felt like “an opportunity to do a little bit of storytelling” that captures the honest, messy, heartfelt accounts of what caregiving looks like in real time, Huckelbridge explained.

And the irony of the campaign isn’t lost on her: “So many people cannot [even] go out of office. We can’t take the time for the care that we need to give.”

Huckelbridge is also blunt about the political reality. “We don’t expect bills to be passing anytime soon in this Congress,” she says. Even so, she sees visibility as its own form of pressure: “Advocacy is never letting up the momentum or the pressure or asking for accountability. So we will continue demanding and making voters' voices heard no matter who is in Congress.”

And by flooding inboxes, social feeds, and public spaces with the truth about caregiving, she hopes the crisis becomes harder to ignore.

“We see the numbers, we see the stats, but Americans are going through a lot of financial devastation right now,” she adds. “If we had paid leave and basic care policies, everybody wins. It would be a world where you had the freedom to control your own life and be with your family and pursue work of your choosing.”