LinkedIn is making it easier for parents to explain career gaps on their digital resumes.
Parents who have been staying at home, taking care of kids, and managing households are now able to add those jobs to their LinkedIn profiles.
Job titles like “stay-at-home mom,” “stay-at-home dad,” and “stay-at-home parent” have been added to the social networking service for English-langugage users.
Additional options include “caretaker,” “homemaker,” “mom” or “dad.”
TODAY notes that the changes come as the networking site aims to allow people to detail reasons for months or years away from the workplace.
LinkedIn spokesperson Suzi Owens told the outlet that users will no longer be required to add a company as the field, currently listed under “experience,” will become optional.
Features coming in the future will also allow users to more accurately detail “employment gaps,” which will list reasons such as “personal leave” or “parental leave.”
Owens explains that the options will “clearly and transparently show a life event in your career.”
"This was absolutely based on member feedback," Catherine Fisher, a career expert at LinkedIn, told "Good Morning America." "It's also really part of our ongoing efforts to make a more inclusive experience for everyone."
"We want people to be able to still thrive in their careers [as parents] and this allows for that more inclusive experience for everyone," she added.
The move comes amid the coronavirus pandemic as roughly “3.5 million mothers living with school-age children left active work — either shifting into paid or unpaid leave, losing their job, or exiting the labor market all together,” a report from the U.S. Census Bureau, conducted in the spring of 2020, revealed.
The report also found that moms were almost three times more likely than men to have their careers impacted due to childcare needs.
More than 2 million women left the labor force since February, according to the National Women's Law Center.
Fortune was the first to report the changes LinkedIn was implementing following a Medium post by Heather Bolen titled “How a Simple Platform Fix Can Help Millions of Women Trying to Re-enter the Workforce,” which criticized the network’s lack of flexible options for women and called on the Microsoft-owned company to “normalize” resume gaps.
As a part of a larger redesign, the company noted several other changes including the option to add and display pronoun preferences in profiles.
“More than 50% (55%) of job seekers agree that gender is an important aspect of their identity, both in and out of the workplace, and 70% of job seekers believe it’s important that recruiters and hiring managers know their gender pronoun,” the company wrote in a news release.
There will also be a “cover story” option that allows users to upload a short video to their profile to showcase their personality.
Per the release, 79% of hiring managers “believe that video has become more important when it comes to interacting with or vetting job candidates,” while 61% of job seekers think a “recorded video” could eventually replace the “traditional cover letter.”
The features will reportedly be rolled out over the course of several months.
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