Kate Gulatz was pregnant with her first child when the COVID-19 pandemic took hold and Wisconsin’s stay-at-home order went into effect.

The Kenosha native planned to continue working in her job as a team leader at a health care IT company in the Madison area through her pregnancy and then return after maternity leave. But what she described as her employer’s unempathetic treatment of her and other staff during the pandemic caused her to reconsider those plans. 

Gulatz, 32, did go back to work for a while before deciding that the company no longer fit her needs. She eventually left her job midway through last year for a position with a life sciences consulting firm. Five months later, she left the workforce entirely to stay at home with her young son, the family making ends meet on the salary from her husband’s research job at a Madison biotech company. 

“It’s phenomenal. It’s the greatest decision I’ve ever made,” Gulatz says. “Our house runs so much smoother. Our dogs are so much calmer. Our bathrooms are always clean. I cook dinner every night. We eat better. We sleep better. My husband and I get so much more quality time together. We even went down to one car.”

Gulatz is one of more than 20 million people across the country who quit their jobs in the second half of 2021, according to a recent government jobs report. The monthly figure rose 32% from February 2020, the month before the pandemic lockdowns, to November 2021, the most recent month for which data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics were available. For the manufacturing and leisure/hospitality sectors, quit rates jumped even higher, 60% and 43%, respectively. 

In Wisconsin, a record 97,000 people quit their jobs in November; the monthly average in the pre-pandemic year of 2019 was 67,000. It comes as the state’s unemployment rate fell to 2.8% in December, an all-time low. Wisconsin’s year-over-year growth in the percentage of people who quit their jobs in 2021 ranked fifth in the country, according to a study of federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data by job resource site Career Cloud.

Interestingly, women have been quitting their jobs at a much higher rate during the pandemic – and particularly those in Wisconsin. 

Milwaukee firm Kane Communications Group recently conducted a comprehensive examination of working women in Wisconsin and found a stunning result: half of the 980 women surveyed were considering quitting their current jobs. The national figure was closer to 1 in 3 in 2021, management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. reported. Kane’s survey found the number of Wisconsin women who are considering leaving their jobs climbs even higher – to 60% – for those working in the retail, food service and hospitality industries.

“Women in Wisconsin are shouldering a lot,” says Kimberly Kane, president and CEO of her eponymous firm. “During the pandemic, we have seen that women are working at high levels while also caring for their families. When employers don’t recognize how much women are shouldering, you begin to see the stress levels of working women go way up.”

Many women feel undervalued at work, Kane says.

“That’s not new. Women feeling stressed at work is also not new,” she says. “What is new is that the pandemic redefined the relationship between employees and employers. Today, women are acting on that feeling of being undervalued. In the past, they stayed put. Now, they are finding new jobs with employers where they hope they will be more valued, or they are simply leaving the workforce entirely and maybe going back to school or caring for their families.”

For Gulatz, one decision after another by her employer left her increasingly frustrated: a switch to an overnight shift; a mid-pandemic, on-site conference she felt wasn’t safe; a potential return to in-person work that she felt was premature; a major restructuring.  

Despite her increasing angst, Gulatz returned after maternity leave only to be told she wouldn’t have the option of working from home. Fed up, Gulatz finally left the company last June. “It goes back to flexibility and empathy,” Gulatz says. “Let people choose what is best for them.”

Many companies have been forced to hike wages to compete in a market struggling with labor shortages, the extended pandemic and workers turning their backs on low-paying jobs, according to Nicholas Jolly, a labor economist at Marquette University.

“This presents an opportunity for workers who want to better their pay or change their working conditions,” Jolly says. “We are seeing wages go up. You hear of businesses offering increases in wages or occupations that would traditionally not have signing bonuses now offering them. You are probably going to see an increase in employer costs as they begin to hire people and try to attract them away from competitors or lure them back into the labor market.”

It’s a hard lesson of sorts, but the pandemic has revealed a need for employers to take immediate steps to be more in tune with the needs of their workforce, Kane says. Employee satisfaction stretches far beyond pay and benefits. “You have a lot of companies in Wisconsin that are slow to recognize how important it is for them to evolve and become companies that are doing good in the world in addition to producing a product or offering a service,” Kane says. “Companies that don’t are going to have a much harder time attracting and retaining talent.” 

The Pandemic Recovery

THE NUMBER OF people employed in Wisconsin has recovered beyond pre-pandemic levels, and unemployment hit an all-time low last December. The percentage of people choosing not to work is down only slightly from 2019; the change of 0.1 percentage point over two years represents about 6,000 would-be workers.