Women's Employment Still Reeling from Pandemic’s Effects

According to the latest analysis by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the pandemic and lockdowns continue to have an outsize effect on women’s employment in the U.S. with fewer than half (44.6%) of the jobs women lost between February and December returning. Another way of looking at it is that roughly 12 million jobs simply disappeared. Or, as Representative Katie Porter tweeted, “Women. Accounted. For. All. The. Losses.”

Reporting on these devastating losses in the economic sector has become something of a broken record talking point for us, but we think it is, now more than ever, essential to continue highlighting it for fear that people become complacent or accept this first female recession as the new normal. 

It is important to think about the industries in which there was significant job loss and consider the reasons why women, especially immigrant and Black women are overrepresented in them, which includes hospitality, domestic work and childcare. We also need to think why so many more women have been unable to return to work when compared to their male peers. 

Many of these reasons are intimately connected to issues of who in our culture is thought to be responsible for social reproduction. Women still do the majority of unpaid domestic labor and because there remains a sizable wage gap along gender lines, when a family is faced with pulling one parent out of the workforce, the calculus usually rests on a simple assessment of who earns more money, most often the male. One need look no further than the statistics for prime-working age women where fewer than 75% of women are employed or seeking work. 

These issues are particularly devastating to poor and working class women whose jobs have not recovered in the same manner as professional women’s work. As economists and analysts feared, we are starting to see a K-shaped recovery, where employment is bifurcated, with professionals and upper management reclaiming their work while employment for lower-wage earners drying up. This can be seen in proxy through white women’s December employment gains (+106,000) when compared to the losses Black, Asian and Latinx women experienced (-318,000).

This comes against a backdrop of overall employment growth that has started to stagnate. According to the latest monthly employment figures, the U.S. economy lost jobs for the first time since the lockdowns in April, shedding 140,000 jobs.