In January, another 275,000 women left the workforce, accounting for nearly 80% of all workers over the age of 20 who left the workforce last month, according to an analysis by the National Center for Women’s Law in the last jobs report.
This raises the total number of women who have left the labor force since February 2020 to over 2.3 million, and puts the female labor force participation rate at 57%, the lowest since 1988, according to the NWLC. In comparison, almost 1.8 million men left the workforce during the same period.
Many of these women, says Emily Martin, NWLC’s vice president of education and workplace justice, have been forced to leave the workplace due to the continued closure of schools and daycare centers. These women, she explains, are not included in the calculated unemployment rate, which is already disproportionately high for women of color.
“To be counted as unemployed, you have to be looking for work,” she told CNBC Make It. “Those who have left the workforce are no longer working or looking for work, so somehow the unemployment rate is artificially reduced by not capturing these millions of women ”.
In January, 49,000 net jobs were added to the economy, with women gaining 87,000 jobs and men losing 38,000 jobs. Despite this positive growth for women, NWLC data show that these job gains do not offset the 5.3 million jobs that women have lost since the start of the pandemic and do not offset the jobs that women lost only in December 2020 .
The Bureau of Labor Statistics initially reported 140,000 jobs lost in December, with women accounting for all of those losses. However, the figures revised in the latest BLS report show that 227,000 jobs were lost in December, with women accounting for 196,000 of those jobs, or 86.3%.
After a decline in employment growth in December, the addition of new jobs in January helped to reduce the overall unemployment rate from 6.7% to 6.3%. Women aged 20 and over faced an unemployment rate of 6% in January, which is equal to the overall unemployment rate faced by men aged 20 and over. When divided by race, white women saw an unemployment rate of 5.1% in January, while Asian women had an unemployment rate of 7.9%, black women saw an unemployment rate of 8.5% and latinas saw an unemployment rate of 8.8%. The only group with an unemployment rate higher than the Latins are black men, who in January had an unemployment rate of 9.4%.
“I think it is foolish not to recognize the fact that racism, whether conscious or subconscious, is impacting some of those numbers,” said Martin, adding that women, especially black women, are overrepresented in sectors such as child care retail and leisure and hospitality, which were hit hard by the pandemic. “And be it conscious or subconscious, [racism] sometimes it influences decisions about who will be fired. “
In addition to black women who face high unemployment rates, NWLC data show that about 40% of women aged 20 and over had been out of work for six months or more in January. Of the women who worked last month, 17% of those over 16 worked part-time involuntarily because they were unable to find full-time work. For women of color, that number was even higher, with 27.9% Latinos, 24.4% black women and 18.5% Asian women forced to work part-time.
These long periods of unemployment, as well as the increased abandonment of women in the workforce, “can really impact wages when an individual finds a job. [full-time] work again, “says Martin, which is why she says more financial relief is crucial to the economic security of working women today.
“These two things in particular really sound the alarm about the impacts of the Covid recession on the wages of women, specifically women of color,” she adds, “and I am concerned about the impact this may have in a few years’ time.”
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