Giving Compass' Take:
- There is evidence to suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic is pushing women out of the labor force to focus on caregiving and homeschooling needs as in-person classes for children becomes less ideal.
- How will this change the makeup of the labor force long-term? How can economic and employment recovery policies be mindful of women's employment struggles?
- Read more about the impact of COVID-19 on working women.
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Claudia Goldin, former head of the American Economic Association, called the period beginning in the mid-1970s the Quiet Revolution (PDF) in women's labor. The ranks of female workers had grown steadily after World War II (see Figure 1), but what changed drastically starting in the '70s according to Goldin wasn't the raw numbers, but mindset. Women made employment decisions for themselves, they pursued careers, and their work became part of their identity.
The COVID-19 pandemic, by any measure, has been a blow to that identity. Added to long-standing challenges, such as securing child care (PDF) and combating pay disparities, is the “she-cession,” the economic downturn that has hit women workers measurably harder than men. Occupations and industries with higher shares of women workers lost more jobs. Meanwhile, school and day care closures appear to have put a further burden on those with children. Indeed, the she-cession and its consequences make clear just how much policy has failed to keep up with women's progress.
There are many ways to examine how the COVID-19 recession affected women generally, and those with children in particular. We'll start with a metric that is one primary measure of women's economic progress historically: labor force participation.
To be counted as in the labor force, an individual must be working or actively looking for work. Once they stop looking for work, they are out of the labor force. Between August and September, 865,000 women left the labor force, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. One particularly sobering statistic: There were 2.2 million fewer women in the labor force in September 2020 than there were in September a year earlier.
Some drop in labor force participation is to be expected during a recession. Individuals lose jobs and, discouraged by the difficult labor market, think they'll sit it out. But for women with children, the concern in this recession is that the need for caregiving in the absence of in-person school and child care is pushing women out.
Read the full article about women leaving the labor force participation by Kathryn Anne Edwards at RAND Corporation.