t’s a bittersweet thing, watching your baby fall in love with someone else. But for working parents, that’s the dream: finding a childminder or nursery worker your child is so thrilled to see every morning that you can slip away almost unnoticed. When the chemistry is right you’d give anything to sustain it, which is why childcare providers going bust isn’t quite the same as other businesses going under. It’s not just nursery workers whose jobs go up in smoke, painful as that is, but small children’s sense of security and sometimes their parents’ working lives too. Each closure represents some family’s precious house of cards collapsing. So why isn’t there more fuss over a survey showing one in six early years providers say they may not last the year, thanks to Covid-19? The all-party parliamentary group on women and work, jointly chaired by Labour’s Jess Phillips and Tory rising star Laura Farris, will shortly publish the findings of a detailed inquiry spelling out the impact of the pandemic on working women’s lives. As they make clear, this goes well beyond the manic days of lockdown, when many mothers took on the lion’s share of home schooling and toddler wrangling while still attempting to do their actual jobs, and consequently lived in fear of getting fired. (On which note, the report will call for redundancies during the pandemic to be recorded by protected characteristics – which should show if women, or workers of colour, or people with disabilities are being singled out unfairly.) The real problem is what happened next: Farris, a former employment lawyer hardly given to wild exaggeration, warned in parliament last week that “we are on the brink of a bloodbath in terms of female employment”, with the economic impact of Covid looking decidedly unequal. Bars, restaurants and retail – all sectors dominated by younger women – are haemorrhaging jobs just as the brewing childcare crisis threatens to pull the rug from under working mothers. Many nurseries were already struggling, pre-Covid, because government funding for the free places offered to parents of eligible preschoolers hasn’t covered the real cost for years. They then suffered deep losses during lockdown, when they had to close to all but vulnerable and key workers’ children. Even now, social distancing means some nurseries can’t take as many toddlers as usual, while others have seen parents pull children out after losing work. Farris tells me she fears women being trapped in a cruel pincer movement: you lose your job, the local nursery shuts, other childcare is hard to find or too expensive, so you end up staying at home until the kids are in school. Only by then, you’ve fallen behind men who didn’t have breaks in their careers. It’s a phenomenon we thought we’d left behind in the noughties, when Labour began a huge expansion of childcare places, yet the pandemic risks turning back the clock. But it’s not inevitable. The report calls for a recovery fund to bail out nurseries – something Farris and other MPs have been lobbying the chancellor about for months – plus new initiatives examining what could replace the retail and hospitality jobs young women are losing to Covid restrictions. But it also wants the government to dig deeper into what’s happening beneath the surface of female lives: to reinstate gender pay gap reports by companies, suspended during the pandemic, and publish detailed assessments of how women and minority groups would be affected by any future Covid measures, from lockdowns to economic stimulus packages. (If kickstarting a battered economy just means ploughing money into infrastructure projects like building roads and insulating houses, the nature of those industries means more of the new jobs will probably go to men.) Already, research published this week by the recruitment website LinkedIn suggests the percentage of women successfully getting hired fell in lockdown, while that of men rose; nearly two-thirds of successful job hunters in April and May were men, and 59% of successful applicants were still male even by autumn. That may reflect who’s hiring – hauliers and logistics firms boomed in the pandemic, while retail was laying people off. Even the shift towards working from home during the pandemic, potentially a boon for parents, may not happen magically all by itself. The percentage of jobs advertised as capable of being worked flexibly – whether part time, job sharing, home working or more minor tweaks – rose from 17% pre-Covid to 22% by summer, according to the flexible working consultancy Timewise. But as its chief executive Emma Stewart points out, employers are still far more willing to tweak hours and conditions for existing staff than to offer flexibility upfront to new ones. The upshot is women stick to low-paid, part-time jobs they’ve long outgrown, for fear of not finding another boss as accommodating. Farris and Phillips want to change the law, making it the default position to advertise jobs as capable of being worked flexibly unless there’s a good reason they can’t be. Boris Johnson’s 2019 manifesto promised a consultation on doing just that, and his equalities minister Liz Truss is thought to be all in favour; all that’s left is to deliver. For all this is in many ways a test of something we heard repeatedly in the days after Dominic Cummings was ousted from Downing Street, supposedly by an alliance of female aides and Johnson’s fiancee, Carrie Symonds. We were told the macho days were over; that the government would be reset along kinder, greener, female-friendly lines. Here’s a chance to make that mean something. As Farris herself says: “It would be a disaster if we came out of this and found that we had let women down.” All the more disastrous, perhaps, for having been avoidable. Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist