By Shaghayegh Hanson
Many moons ago, I wrote an article in Peyk entitled, “It’s Still a Man’s World.” (Peyk #121, May-June 2009.) I was making the point that despite the expansion of opportunities for women outside the home, we are still: (1) the main caretakers inside the home; and (2) we are not treated or paid equal to men in the labor force. I never imagined that, just over a decade later, a global pandemic would render these existing inequities the tipping point for women walking the home/career tightrope.
There is abundant evidence that women are bearing the brunt of the pandemic’s effect on the labor market, such that economists are calling it a “shecession” (as opposed to the “mancession” of 2008, when mostly men lost manufacturing jobs in the Great Recession).1 According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics,2 55 percent of the 20.5 million jobs lost in April 2020 were attributable to women. Most disturbing, however, is this grim statistic: approximately 865,000 women have had to drop out of the workforce altogether since those April 2020 statistics. A further 2 million women are considering leaving the workforce, taking a leave of absence, or some other downshifting of their careers.3
The consequences of this shecession are alarming, not least because it threatens to wipe out the progress women have made in the labor market over the last few decades.4 Before the pandemic hit, in December 2019, women held more payroll jobs than men for the first time in about a decade; that statistic was wiped out overnight.1
The factors at play are readily apparent. With 7 million Americans reporting unemployment due to caring for children,4 one of the hardest hit groups is mothers with young children. When I wrote my 2009 article about how mothers were still responsible for the lion’s share of household/childcare responsibilities, I based my conclusions on my personal experience of juggling a full-time legal career with raising two children in elementary school. I knew my female colleagues were jugglers, too. Recently, a report published by Lean In—a nonprofit founded by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s CEO, to support women in the workforce—has confirmed that working mothers are more than three times as likely to be responsible for the majority of the housework and child care during the pandemic.2 With most schools and daycares closed, this responsibility has become a full-time job, taken up by mothers, rather than fathers, not just because of enduring gender role assignations, but also because the gender wage gap makes the decision for women to quit work economically prudent. The latest Census Bureau data shows women earn approximately 82 cents for every $1 earned by their male counterparts.5 Economists predict that if, and when, these women return to the workforce in the future, the wage gap will be more than 2 percentage points wider.4
Women of color have also been disproportionately affected because a large number work in industries hardest hit by the pandemic, that is, leisure, hospitality, service, education, and even some parts of health care. For example, women make up 94 percent of child care workers, 73.2 percent of workers in clothing stores, 51.2 percent of workers in the leisure and hospitality industry, 61.2 percent of manicurists and pedicurists, 60.3 percent of maids and housekeepers, and 57.2 percent of skin care specialists. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, because these jobs are also underpaid and undervalued, newly unemployed women have less of a financial cushion to fall back on.1 For single women, the threat of falling into indefinite poverty is very real; a third of single mothers were already living below the poverty line and, since February, at least a million of them have lost their jobs.1
Given the circumstances, I am left to wonder why we are not giving the full-throated attention to women’s rights issues as we are to the usual gender-neutral matters of fiscal policy. It appears the problem begins at home, because “[c]ouples tend to see men’s unemployment as a problem,” but “reframe women’s unemployment as an acceptable way for women to take care of their family.”6 This reframing carries over to mainstream media discussions of the current economic crisis. But overlooking women’s issues in a shecession is not conducive to finding solutions for long-lasting economic recovery.
There is no sense in creating jobs without ensuring that women, in particular, are able to return to work. Policymakers and employers must begin to view the economic impact of the pandemic specifically through the lens of a shecession if we want a speedy recovery. Therefore, any government stimulus package, or employer-based recovery efforts, must include correcting gender disparities by addressing paid sick leave and family leave, affordable childcare, an increase in the minimum wage, onsite daycare centers (as they had during World War II for women in factories), and paternity leave, to encourage an equal investment of time by fathers in the home. Where remote work is possible and/or necessary for women to keep working, employers should make such flexibility available, without treating it as a dead-end to promotion or a wage increase. There are many other solutions that could be undertaken if we set our minds on the relevant corrective measures.
Just as George Floyd’s murder has given us a popular mandate to fix systemic racism, the pandemic’s shecession must also be treated as an inflection point in how we move towards gender parity in the labor market. Failure to make the most of this opportunity now, when the demand and need is the most urgent, is dooming women, including our mothers, sisters, and daughters, to continued struggle in a man’s world, despite working twice as hard in it.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/us/unemployment-coronavirus-women.html
2. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/10/11/865-000-women-were-laid-off-last-month/3609016001/
3. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/women-work-gender-equality-covid19/
4. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-30/u-s-recovery-women-s-job-losses-will-hit-entire-economy
5.https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2020/03/24/482141/quick-facts-gender-wage-gap/
6. https://www.vox.com/2020/6/10/21271170/coronavirus-great-recession-2020-pandemic-women-covid
