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Annual child care costs in the U.S. now total more than average annual rent costs in all 50 states. Professional services firm KPMG estimates that between 1.2 and 1.5 million workers, 90% of whom are women, either shorten working hours or miss work entirely each month because of child care access.

It is within this environment that KPMG has come out with a new index that breaks down the loss in working hours, as well as yearly and lifetime wages, that stem from child care access problems. It’s “a clear way for companies to understand the strains in the labor market,” Matthew Nestler, a senior economist at KPMG U.S. and author of the index, told my colleague Maria Gracia Santillana Linares. “The loss in working hours is valuable to companies because [it quantifies] the child care problems their employees are having.”

We talk about the cost of childcare (and caregiving in general) a lot in the ForbesWomen space, so that there is a crisis might not be news to anyone reading this note. However, according to Julia Cohen Sebastien, the cofounder and CEO of caregiving startup Grayce, some 52% of employers are not aware of the caregiving demands (in both time and money) on their workforce.

“The cost of care is untenable for people at every........

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