COVID-19 caused job losses have hit women much harder than men

Written by Cate Nichols

People all over the world were adversely impacted by COVID-19, with many countries spending some time in various degrees of lockdown. While this has been first and foremost a health issue with people tragically losing their lives, many others have lost their livelihoods. Job loss and recovery over the pandemic shows a stark gendered disparity, with women being directly impacted far more than men in the United States.

February 2020 through April 2021, net job losses for women in the U.S. labor force reached 4.5 million. This compares to net job losses for 1.6 million men. Participation of women in the U.S. workforce had been steadily increasing year after year for decades, but in one year the country is back to the same participation rates of October 1988.

“It is rooted in some of the issues that we had thought we had overcome. We are still living in a patriarchal society,” states Dr. Trisha Teig in an interview. Teig is a faculty director for the Colorado Women’s College (CWC) Leadership Scholars program at the University of Denver (DU), a program for first generation women of color and womxn who identify as LGBTQ.

Teig goes on to say, “Work still is not created for women. It was created based on men being in work, based on constructs of time of presuming that someone else was caring for your external family and food and home. And so even though we have gone much past that in many ways, we’re still built on this construct.”

This construct is precisely what paved the way for job loss rates for women to be so high in this country over the past year and a half. In December 2020, 100% of jobs lost in the U.S. that month were jobs held by women. Other steep downturns for women specifically were reported April 2020 when lockdowns first happened across the nation, and September 2020 when the new school year started.

The most recent monthly jobs report from the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), which synthesizes statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), states that 1 in 18 women 20 years old and older were unemployed in June 2021. That is an unemployment rate of 5.5% – compared to 3.1% in February 2020. The numbers show that women of color were hit even harder in that 1 in 13 Latinas and 1 in 12 Black women were unemployed in that same timeframe.

Gendered disparities in the U.S. workforce that already existed are what caused the mass exodus of women over this past year and a half.

According to the BLS, overall, women earn 82 cents for every dollar that men make. For that same one dollar a man is paid, Black women earn 62 cents, and Latina women earn 52 cents. If someone in an opposite-sex couple must decide to leave their job and stay home, it makes economic sense for the person with the lower salary to do so.
University of Denver teaching associate professor Dr. Paula Cole explains: “This is different from previous economic crises…like the Great Recession, we actually saw men losing jobs first and at a higher rate.”

“That lower wage for me really connects back to the devaluation of care in our economic system. We have assigned women to those care tasks – they’re working them in the marketplace, but they don’t pay very well,” says Cole, whose PhD is in economics and expertise is in how women engage in the economy.

But women don’t just do the majority of care tasks outside the home. Women are still expected to be the primary caretakers of the house and children in opposite-sex relationships. According to Pew Research, 59% of women answered they do the majority of the housework, and 78% of women said they are the primary managers of their children.

This unequal share of emotional labor, coupled with the gender pay gap, created an environment where overwhelmingly, mothers not fathers, were the ones who left their jobs to stay home when childcare centers and schools closed down due to COVID-19.

Dr. Lisa M. Martinez, professor of Sociology at the University of Denver who teaches courses Gender in Society and Social Inequality notes that, “There is a significant body of work in Sociology on gender and work. Much of this research focuses on what sociologist Arlie Hochschild terms ‘the second shift,’ where women work a full day at the office/work and then must complete a second shift at home tending to children, family, and household responsibilities.”

However, with or without children, and with or without partners, another reason women were specifically hit hard this past year is, as Cole mentioned, due to what types of jobs they typically work in our country.

Pew Research reported in June of 2020 that, “Just three sectors – leisure and hospitality, education and health services, and retail trade – accounted for 59% of the total loss in nonfarm jobs from February to May. These sectors also accounted for 47% of jobs held by women in February, compared with 28% for men, exposing women to a higher risk of unemployment in recent months.”

While these and other experts in various fields of academia can pinpoint these pre-existing conditions that have led us to this moment, others are shedding light on what the future may hold depending on what we do collectively in the present.

McKinsey & Company projects that if nothing is done to address these systemic causes, in 2030 the global GDP will be $1 trillion short of what it could be if men and women had been affected equally over the pandemic. And in the U.S., projections show that while men may reach pre-pandemic employment rates next year, it will likely take women at least until 2024.

Martinez says, “Any changes would need to first recognize the structural factors that lead to gender differences in employment and pay in the first place, as well as gender ideology that perpetuates or serves as the engine that drives these types of arrangements.”

All three of the women interviewed pointed out that having more women in decision making roles in government and in the private sector will be important for positive meaningful progress for women in the workforce.
Also important for potential policy change are advocacy groups in D.C. and across the nation that have been working in this arena for decades.

The National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) has existed since 1972 and they file amicus briefs to courts hearing cases that directly affect women’s rights. In May 2021, they released a lengthy detailed report on childcare assistance policies.

Center for American Progress (CAP), a policy institute that was created in 2003 and houses the Women’s Initiative, released a report October 2020 giving women’s employment statistics at that point and what it meant for the future for home life and the U.S. economy.

And the think tank Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) has been around since 1987. They are the organization behind the “Status of Women in the States” interactive website that breaks down how women fare in each state on areas called work and family, poverty and opportunity, and employment and earnings. IWPR also provides microgrants to research and policy groups that focus on these specific topics.

The work of these and other organizations devoted to women’s rights prior to the pandemic continues, with this crisis adding to their plates.

“Everyone struggled during the pandemic,” says Cole. “We all experienced tough decisions and isolation, but I think some of us had easier choices than others in terms of how we could protect ourselves and our families and how we could remain stable economically.”

Answers to how to rectify the short- and long-term ramifications of the numbers of jobs lost by women due to COVID-19 will require addressing the intersecting identities of women inside the labor force and in their lives at home. Turning a blind eye to the needs of women based on all of these layers will continue to uphold societal gender inequalities.

As Dr. Teig points out, “We don’t unbecome ourselves when we come to work.”