In January, another 275,000 women fell out of the workforce, accounting for nearly 80% of all workers over 20 who left the workforce last month, according to a National Women’s Law Center analysis of the latest jobs report.
This brings the total number of women who have left the workforce to more than 2.3 million since February 2020, and brings the female employment rate to 57%, the lowest since 1988, according to NWLC. In comparison, nearly 1.8 million men left the labor force in the same period.
Many of these women, says Emily Martin, VP for Education and Workplace Justice at NWLC, have been forced to leave the workplace due to the ongoing 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 considered unemployed, you have to be looking for work,” she told CNBC Make It. “Those who have left the labor force are no longer working and are no longer looking for work, so in some ways the unemployment rate is artificially lowered by not trapping these millions of women.”
In January, 49,000 net jobs were added to the economy, with women gaining 87,000 and men losing 38,000. Despite this positive growth for women, data from NWLC shows that this job growth does not account for the 5.3 million jobs women have lost since the start of the pandemic, and not for the jobs women lost in December 2020 alone .
Initially, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 140,000 jobs lost in December, with women responsible for all those losses. However, revised figures in BLS’s latest report show that 227,000 jobs were lost in December, with women accounting for 196,000 of those jobs, or 86.3%.
After a dip in job growth in December, the addition of new jobs in January helped the overall unemployment rate to drop from 6.7% to 6.3%. Women 20 years and older faced an unemployment rate of 6% in January, which is the same as the overall unemployment rate for men 20 years and older. Disaggregated by race, white women saw an unemployment rate of 5.1% in January, while Asian women saw an unemployment rate of 7.9%, black women an unemployment rate of 8.5% and Latinas an unemployment rate of 8.8%. The only group with an unemployment rate higher than Latinas are black men, who had an unemployment rate of 9.4% in January.
“I think it’s foolish not to recognize that racism, knowingly or unknowingly, is affecting some of these figures,” says Martin, adding that women, especially women of color, are over-represented in sectors such as retail. care and leisure and hospitality, which have been hit hard by the pandemic. And be it conscious or unconscious, [racism] sometimes influences decisions about who it is who gets fired. “
In addition to women of color facing high unemployment rates, data from NWLC shows that about 40% of women aged 20 and over were out of work for six months or more in January. Of the women who worked last month, 17% of the over-16s involuntarily worked part-time because they could not find a full-time job. For women of color, this number was even higher with 27.9% Latinas, 24.4% Black women, and 18.5% Asian women forced to work part-time.
These long periods of unemployment, as well as the increase in the number of women dropping out of the workforce, ‘can really affect wages when someone [full-time] another job, ‘says Martin, that’s why she says increased financial support is crucial for the economic security of working women.
“Those two things in particular are ringing alarm bells about the impact of the Covid recession on women’s wages, especially women of color,” she adds, “and I’m concerned about the impact it could have in years to come. . “
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