We Need Champions: Women, Work, and Recovery During and After COVID-19
Today’s blog comes from GenderAvenger Suzanne Kahn, who studies and is often cited for her expertise on the effect of public policy on women’s economic circumstances.
This week, representative Katie Porter (D-CA) released a report finding that just over 1 in 5 women has left the workforce since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The reasons for this exodus are many, but chief among them are the facts that service sector jobs that are traditionally dominated by women have been some of the hardest hit by this recession and that, as childcare options have closed and schools have gone remote, women have been forced to take on more care work in the home. If you care about women’s representation in the workplace and in positions of power, you should be very, very concerned.
photo credit: Christina @ wocintechchat.com, via Unsplash
In 2019, women’s workforce participation was at a decades-long high,¹ with women holding the majority of all jobs in America. To be clear, women still faced discrimination in pay and hiring and did the lion’s share of care work in the home, but progress was being made in terms of representation in the workforce. COVID-19 has set that back.
Between February and May of 2020, women’s labor force participation fell by 15 percent, while men’s labor force participation fell by only 11 percent. At that phase in the pandemic, this difference was credited to which industries were being shuttered. Overall in those early months, 59 percent of jobs² lost were in three sectors: hospitality/leisure, education and health services, and retail jobs. Immediately prior to the pandemic, 47 percent² of all employed women held jobs in those sectors. It is also important to recognize that women in these sectors who did not lose their jobs were disproportionately on the frontlines of the pandemic.
photo credit: Kelly Sikkema, via Unsplash
Childcare, or lack thereof, is the other factor driving women out of the workforce. Remote schooling and shuttered childcare centers have increased the number of hours parents are responsible for watching their children, and that new work has fallen disproportionately on mothers. The role childcare is playing in women’s exit from the workforce was crystallized in September when, in the face of a new year of remote schooling, 865,000 women³ left the workforce, which is four times more women than men. One study found that 42 percent of women with children under 2 were out of the workforce because of the pandemic.
Critically, these losses have not been equally shared among women. In the early months of the pandemic, Latinx women experienced the steepest job loss (21 percent),² followed by Asian women (19 percent)² and Black women (17 percent);² white women’s employment fell by only 13 percent.² Further, women of color have returned to the labor force much more slowly than white women. A Washington Post report in August found that white women had recovered 61 percent jobs lost, while Black women had recovered only 34 percent.
These disparities should not be credited exclusively to occupational segregation. The share of Black women with children under 13 who are working or looking for work fell by over 5 percent between February and October, compared to only 1 percent of Black women without children. In contrast, the share of white women with young children in the workforce fell by only 2.5 percent, compared to 1.5 percent of white women without young children. These numbers suggest that in addition to being concentrated in employment sectors that experienced disproportionate job loss, Black women have had fewer childcare options during the pandemic.
Overall, the recovery has been slow for women. While women make up just under 50 percent of the workforce (49.7%), they have accounted for only 43.3 percent¹ of jobs recovered.
Fewer women in the workforce will have important long-term effects. It will ultimately mean fewer women in leadership positions across industries. With fewer women in the workforce and in positions of power, the national and workplace policies that have made this pandemic so hard on women will be more difficult to change. This pandemic has made clear that we need champions to push for accessible and affordable childcare, policies that break down occupational segregation by gender, and other policies that make it easier for women to enter and stay in the workforce. Without strong, public voices that highlight the facts and extoll such policies, we will not see women’s still tenuous place in the workforce improve.
Suzanne Kahn is the Director of Education, Jobs, and Worker Power at the Roosevelt Institute. Her first book, Divorce, American Style, will be released in April 2021.
¹ Office of Congresswoman Katie Porter. (8 December 2020). The Burden of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Women in the Workforce. Retrieved from https://porter.house.gov/uploadedfiles/final-_women_in_the_workforce.pdf
² Hochhar, Rakesh. (9 June 2020). Hispanic women, immigrants, young adults, those with less education hit hardest by COVID-19 job losses. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/09/hispanic-women-immigrants-young-adults-those-with-less-education-hit-hardest-by-covid-19-job-losses/
³ Kashen, Julie, et al. (30 October 2020). How COVID-19 Sent Women’s Workforce Progress Backward. Retrieved from https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2020/10/30/492582/covid-19-sent-womens-workforce-progress-backward/