Even though there is still volatility in the US economy amid the coronavirus pandemic, the consistent theme is still the extraordinary impact on women, economic experts say.
The January employment report appears to continue to confirm this. About 275,000 women left the workforce last month, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared with 71,000 men. And women represent more than half of the 7 million people considered “out of the job market” in the report – who are not counted as unemployed – but who currently want to work. Overall, nearly 2.4 million women have left the workforce since last February, compared to less than 1.8 million men.
Covid-19’s continued disproportionate impact on working women will have lasting impacts on the country’s economy, said Jocelyn Frye, senior researcher at the Center for American Progress.
“Your productivity, your participation in the workforce is felt in our GDP. These are not just niche issues, they are actually critical issues for our economic growth, ”she said. “We knew and knew long before the pandemic that women are increasingly essential to the economic security of their families.”
Frye said when he looked at the January job numbers: “I think it shows that this is a slow recovery. This is not going to happen anytime soon. “
“The consequences for women can take years to recover, and we don’t have years to wait. Families don’t have to wait years, ”she said.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the recession that followed was dubbed the “she-cession,” as millions of women were the first to lose their jobs when the coronavirus closed the service sector and tightened government budgets. Women also account for more than 50% of the 5,318,000 jobs lost since February 2020, according to data from the statistics department. Although women obtained 87,000 jobs in January, they are still far behind men in returning to pre-pandemic job levels. In fact, in December, the economy saw a reduction of 140,000 jobs, with women accounting for all job losses by 156,000, while men won 16,000 jobs.
The pandemic has also forced many women to choose between taking care of their children at home and working, as daycare options have run out and schools have become virtual.
“The choices are tough,” said Frye.
Last month, job losses continued to hurt the food and bar industry, where women represent 49% of entry-level jobs, according to McKinsey & Company. Food and bar services lost 19,000 jobs last month, while leisure and hospitality lost 597,000 jobs in the past two months, according to the statistics department. Retail, where about half the workers are women, has lost 383,000 jobs since February 2020. Healthcare jobs have also fallen 542,000 since before the pandemic.
Black women, who are most likely to have jobs in the service sector or in the government, were hardest hit by the unemployment pandemic.
Nicole Mason, president and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, said that some of the jobs that women lost during the pandemic will not return, even when restrictions are lifted, with companies not yet at pre-pandemic staffing levels.
“The second part is that, as schools and daycare centers continue to close, there is a level of uncertainty and unpredictability for women who want to look for a job or reenter the job market,” she said. “These are the calculations that women are doing.”
“Until we manage to control the pandemic and open schools, it will remain slow and we will not see women returning to the labor market in real and significant numbers,” she said. “I believe that we will continue to see women continue to fall out of the workforce and unemployment levels persist.”
Stephanie Aaronson, director of the Brookings Institution’s program of economic studies, added that when people need to change their industry or occupation, “these transitions take a lot longer.”
Women may also lose their job networks and need to undergo further training, she said.
“As the economy improves and schools reopen, they may take longer to find jobs,” she said. “They may find that the jobs they are entitled to pay lower wages than their previous jobs and that will be disheartening. Therefore, I think it is possible, in this respect, also that women could end up with a lower participation in the labor force than we saw before the recession ”.
Long before the pandemic, women and people of color had already been segregated into sectors that would be the first to be attacked, said Kate Bahn, director of labor market policy and economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. While the national unemployment rate soared to 14.7% in April last year, the unemployment rate for black women was 16.9% and for Latinas it was 20.2%, according to an analysis of data from the government of the Economic Policy Institute.
This disparity only continued during the recession. In January, the unemployment rate for black women was 8.5%, with Latino women at 8.8%, while the national rate dropped to 6.3%, according to the statistics department.
“Even in good times, gaps have always existed,” said Adriana Kugler, a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. “But we certainly need to do something about it. Things will not recover on their own. “
The increase in the number of women in the workforce can have important effects on the economy as a whole. A report by McKinsey & Company published in 2015 estimated that, if women also participated in the men’s economy, global GDP would increase by up to $ 28 trillion by 2025.
Mason said that all of these factors are the reason why “it is really important that we really focus on how we will have a gender equality recovery and focus the most impacted on our relief efforts.”
President Joe Biden proposed a broad $ 1.9 trillion stimulus proposal that would increase and extend federal unemployment benefits, distribute direct stimulus payments, finance day care centers for parents who need to get back to work, and raise the minimum wage to $ 15 an hour. All of these efforts will “allow parents, especially women, to return to work – millions who are not working now because they are not being cared for,” said Biden in January.
In a speech on Friday, Biden said that raising the minimum wage is “the real answer to the crisis we live in.” More than half of the workers who would benefit from a salary increase are women, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
An analysis of the Biden plan by the Brookings Institution, including the increase in the minimum wage, estimates that the package would increase the country’s GDP by about 4 percent at the end of 2021 and 2 percent at the end of 2022, which exceeds projections pre-pandemic by 1 percent.
“If we had a national scale minimum wage increase, we would have made up for some of the losses in the recession,” said Bahn.
But the plan hit a wall in Congress. Republicans say the plan is too expensive and premature after Congress passed a $ 900 billion aid package in December. Instead, they proposed a $ 600 billion aid program that reverses Biden’s unemployment insurance, limits direct checks to $ 1,000, and eliminates raising the minimum wage to $ 15.
In the early hours of Friday, the Senate voted 51 to 50 to advance the budget vehicle for the aid package, which cannot be blocked by Republicans. The House passed it by a vote of 219-209 in the afternoon, instructing Congress to speed up a bill.
Biden himself expressed doubts on Friday that the proposed minimum wage increase would reach the final version of the pandemic relief proposal.
As Congress continues its battle, women are driven out of the job market like Stacey Johnson in Tampa, Florida, and are waiting for relief. Johnson, 45, told NBC News that she has lived mostly in her car since she lost her job in March. She was threatened with eviction from her apartment at the beginning of the pandemic, after being six weeks behind in rent. Instead of risking a dump on her credit report, she left.
“It’s like one thing after another,” she said.
A former cook at a sports bar, she said she applied for a job at a fast food restaurant, but was refused because she was overqualified. His plan is to keep applying for a job while saving $ 220 a month on his weekly unemployment checks, until he has enough to pay for an apartment. At that rate, she said it will take four months to save what she needs for a home.
“I’ve never been in this situation before and it’s really depressing,” said Johnson, who studied business administration at Grantham University in Kansas. “It’s like being a stockbroker – you can be on top of the world in a minute and then stocks go down and everything is gone. As for me, everything is gone. “