While there is still volatility in the U.S. economy amid the coronavirus pandemic, the constant theme is still the inordinate impact on women, economic experts said.
The January jobs report seems to continue to confirm that. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 275,000 women left the workforce last month, versus 71,000 men. And women make up more than half of the 7 million people identified in the report as “outside the labor force” – who are not considered unemployed – but who currently want to work. In total, nearly 2.4 million women have left the labor market since February last year, compared to less than 1.8 million men.
The continued disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on working women will have lasting effects on the country’s economy, said Jocelyn Frye, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
“Their productivity, their participation in the labor force is tangible in our GDP. These are not just niche issues, these are actually issues that are critical to our economic growth, ”she said. “We know and knew long before the pandemic that women will play an increasingly important role in the economic security of their families.”
Frye said when she looked at the January job numbers, “I think it shows this is a slow recovery. It doesn’t happen quickly. “
“The consequences for women can take years to recover from, and we don’t have to wait years. Families don’t have to wait for years, ”she said.
At the outset of the pandemic, the ensuing recession was dubbed a “she-cession” as millions of women were among the first to lose jobs as the coronavirus shut down the services sector and strained government budgets. According to data from the statistics office, women also account for more than 50 percent of the 5,318,000 jobs lost since February 2020. Although women took 87,000 jobs in January, they are still far behind in returning to pre-pandemic employment levels. In December, the economy saw a decline of 140,000 jobs, with women responsible for all the job losses at 156,000, while men got 16,000 jobs.
The pandemic has also forced many women to choose between caring for their children at home and at work, as childcare facilities dried up and schools became virtual.
“The choices are grim,” said Frye.
Last month, job cuts continued to plague the food and bar industry, where women make up 49 percent of entry-level service jobs, according to McKinsey & Company. According to the statistics office, 19,000 jobs were lost in the hospitality and hospitality industry last month, while 597,000 jobs were lost in the last two months. The retail sector, where about half of the employees are women, has lost 383,000 jobs since February 2020. Healthcare jobs have also fallen by 542,000 since before the pandemic.
Women of color, who are more likely to have jobs in the service sector or government, have been hit hardest by pandemic unemployment.
Nicole Mason, president and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, said some jobs women lost during the pandemic will not come back, even when restrictions are lifted, with companies still lacking a pre-pandemic workforce.
“The second part of this is that as schools and daycare centers remain closed, there is a level of uncertainty and unpredictability for women who want to get or return to work,” she said. “These are the calculations that women make.”
“Until we can get the pandemic under control and open schools, it will remain slow and we will not see women returning to the labor market in significant, real numbers,” she said. “I think we will continue to see women drop out of the labor force and unemployment to continue.”
Stephanie Aaronson, director of the economic studies program at Brookings Institution, added that when people have to change industries or professions, “those transitions take much longer.”
Women can also lose their work networks and have to retrain, she said.
“As the economy improves and schools reopen, it may take longer for them to find work,” she said. “They may find that the jobs they qualify for pay lower wages than their previous jobs and that will be discouraging. So I think in that regard, too, it’s possible that women just like that end up with some sort of persistently lower employment rate than what we saw before the recession. “
Well before the pandemic, women and people of color were separated in the sectors that had been the first to suffer, said Kate Bahn, director of labor market policy and economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. While the national unemployment rate skyrocketed to 14.7 percent in April last year, the unemployment rate for black women was 16.9 percent and for Latinas 20.2 percent, according to an analysis of government data by the Economic Policy Institute.
That inequality has only remained during the recession. In January, the unemployment rate for black women was 8.5 percent, while Latina women were 8.8 percent, while the national rate fell to 6.3 percent, the statistics office said.
“Even in good times, the gaps have always been there,” said Adriana Kugler, a professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. “But we definitely have to do something about it. Things will not recover on their own. “
An increase in the number of women in the labor force can have a major impact on the economy as a whole. A report by McKinsey & Company published in 2015 estimated that if women were to participate in the economy as much as men, global GDP would increase by as much as $ 28 trillion by 2025.
Mason said all of these factors are why “it is very important that we really focus on how we have a gender-balanced recovery and how the center is most affected in our relief efforts.”
President Joe Biden has proposed a massive $ 1.9 trillion stimulus proposal that would improve and expand federal unemployment benefits, distribute direct stimulus payments, fund childcare for parents returning to work, and raise the minimum wage to $ 15 an hour. These are all efforts that “will enable parents, especially women, to return to work – millions who don’t work now because they don’t have that care,” Biden said in January.
In a speech on Friday, Biden said raising the minimum wage is the “real answer to the crisis we are in.” According to the Economic Policy Institute, more than half of the workers who would benefit from a pay rise are women.
A Brookings Institution analysis of Biden’s plan, including the minimum wage hike, estimates that the package would increase the country’s GDP by about 4 percent by the end of 2021 and 2 percent by the end of 2022, which is 1 percent. is higher than the forecasts before the pandemic.
“If we had a national hike in the minimum wage to scale, we would have offset some of the losses during the recession,” Bahn said.
But the plan hit a wall in Congress. Republicans say the plan is too expensive and premature after Congress approved a $ 900 billion aid package in December. Instead, they’ve proposed a $ 600 billion utility that will reverse Biden’s unemployment insurance, limit direct checks to $ 1,000, and end raising the minimum wage to $ 15.
Early Friday morning, the Senate voted 51-50 to advance the budget vehicle for the aid package, which cannot be blocked by Republicans. Parliament passed it in the afternoon with a vote of 219-209, instructing Congress to speed up a bill.
Biden himself doubted on Friday whether the proposed increase to the minimum wage would make it to the final version of the pandemic shelter proposal.
As Congress continues its fight, women like Stacey Johnson in Tampa, Florida are being pushed out of the workforce in anticipation of relief. Johnson, 45, told NBC News that she has mostly lived in her car since she lost her job in March. She was threatened with eviction from her apartment at the start of the pandemic after being six weeks behind in rent. Rather than risk an eviction on her credit report, she left.
“It’s just one thing after another,” she said.
She was a former cook at a sports bar and said she applied for a job at a fast food restaurant but was turned down because she was overqualified. Her plan is to keep applying while saving $ 220 a month on her weekly unemployment checks until she has enough for a down payment for an apartment. At this rate, she said it will take four months to save what she needs for a home.
“I’ve never been in this situation and this is really depressing,” said Johnson, a business management student at Grantham University in Kansas. “It’s like being a stockbroker – you can be at the top of the world for a minute and then the stock goes down and everything is gone. Like me, everything is gone. “