After 2 Years of the Pandemic, the Gender Wage Gap Remains by Suzanne Hanney
asking themselves, ‘Does it make sense to work when all of my income is going to pay for childcare?’
There are 1.1 million fewer women in the labor force today than in February 2020, according to the March 31 report by the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), “Resilient But Not Recovered: After Two Years of the COVID-19 Crisis, Women are Still Struggling.”
“And on top of that straight-up cost/benefit analysis, you have to ask, ‘What exposure risk am I bringing to myself and my family, my health and the wellbeing of my kids?’”
Improving the labor statistics is not as simple as reopening industries like hotels and restaurants, Majmudar said. "It's a matter of making sure industries are stronger because of investments in workers." Unemployment rates are a limited indicator of recovery, Majmudar said, because they do not capture people who are no longer looking for employment – like many Moms. What makes childcare especially relevant to the recovery is that women of color comprised much of its infrastructure. “The childcare infrastructure was already frayed going into the pandemic, not necessarily accessible, affordable or with assurances of consistent level of quality,” she said.
COVER STORY
“Then the pandemic happened, and the childcare industry was hit very hard. We lost lots of providers and many have not come back. They have been navigating the same things so many of us have. What happens when a child contracts COVID and you have to shut down the daycare center?” Childcare is not just an employment sector for many women of color who are either the primary breadwinner or the co-breadwinner for their families. It also “is an industry that women up and down the economic ladder rely on in order to work themselves,” Majmudar said. Two factors have inhibited women’s use of childcare to return to work at pre-COVID levels. “If you are earning so little that your primary expenditure is childcare itself, women are
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Women’s employment seesawed during the pandemic, according to Liz Elting on Forbes.com. In the first two months, women accounted for the majority of lost jobs-- 12.2 million, compared to 11.2 million jobs lost by men. But as the first wave of the pandemic ebbed during the summer of 2020, restaurants and hotels reopened, and women regained jobs as service workers and waitstaff faster than men. A fall wave of COVID caused women’s job gains to falter, followed by an uptick and then a collapse in winter. By the end of 2020, employment of both sexes was down by 3 million. Elting described “wild” employment swings in 2021. There were gains in February and March, thanks to vaccine optimism, then a crash when April brought more COVID numbers. August, and the combination of the start of the school year and the peak of the delta wave, curtailed hiring. A slow recovery fell apart with the omicron surge. “Women lose opportunities at the start of the school year (due to uncertainty as to whether schools will be open and whether childcare will be available) and during the winter (when the virus surges, schools go remote, daycares close, and mothers are more likely to need to be home to care for their kids), while women's gains surge in the warmer months (when there is both a decline in virus transmission and an uptick in restaurant and retail business, thus necessitating more service staff) and fall again as new waves of variants disrupt shopping, travel, and dining out.” Men’s employment, however, doesn’t seem to follow the same rationale, Elting wrote. Indeed, the “Resilient But Not Recovered” study noted that among parents who lost or quit a job during the pandemic,
Majmudar (Women Employed photo).
Women’s employment is still lagging in the pandemic recovery, with Black women and other ethnic minorities especially hard hit, says Sharmili Majmudar, executive vice president of policy and organizational impact at Women Employed.
