COVID Has Set Women Back — We Can Change That

Employees making respiratory masks in a factory in Florida. [AFP/Chandan Khanna]

By Bryce Covert

COVID’s economic fallout is a disaster for women, and like most disasters, it’s in part man-made.

The pandemic has cost millions of jobs as businesses have responded to a decline in shopping, eating out and movie going — but women have felt the sharpest pain. They’ve lost more jobs than men every month since the crisis started, and in December, women represented all of the jobs lost, while men actually gained some back. They’re currently 1 million jobs deeper into job loss than men. 

The crisis is so acute that Hanna Rosin has been forced to recant her conclusion in her 2012 book The End of Men predicting that American women would overtake men in workplace success. “The optimism! The smugness! The tragic naïveté!” she lamented. “It’s now painfully obvious that the mass entry of women into the workforce was rigged from the beginning.”

Now, it’s about to get worse. 

So far, women have been losing jobs for two important reasons. The first is that they hold a larger share of service sector jobs, so are much more likely to work in the kinds of businesses that have been hammered by COVID, from restaurants to nail salons.

The second is that many working women are mothers, and they rely on steady childcare to show up to work each day. But many daycare centers have closed, and nearly all schools were remote in the spring (many still are). Researchers looked into who was taking on all of the extra childcare, thinking that with so many people at home, men might step up.

That was not the case. 

One researcher estimated that as of September, there were 1.6 million fewer mothers in the labor force due to school and childcare center closures.

The big crunch

Now women face increasing headwinds. The pandemic’s crunch on business is turning into a crunch on state and local governments — less business activity means lower tax revenues at a time when people need more government assistance. This strains budgets and has already led to more layoffs than during the entire Great Recession.

Congress has remained deadlocked over whether and how much aid to send to reduce the burden. If help doesn’t arrive soon, women are poised for even more devastating layoffs: They hold about three-fifths of all state and local government jobs. 

Without adequate stimulus in the wake of the 2008 recession, the “mancession” quickly turned into one hurting women, as government job losses hit them hard. Over half a million women lost their public sector jobs between 2007 and 2012. We’re set for a repeat if Congress doesn’t act.

Even if they’re able to keep their jobs, women still have to deal with a lack of childcare and in-person school, and that burden doesn’t look ready to ease anytime soon. More contagious and possibly deadly strains of COVID are circulating. COVID case numbers are sky high. And vaccination isn’t going fast enough to reach many childcare providers and teachers for months, let alone the entire population.

Cash for equality 

None of this is inevitable. The federal government could do a lot more to protect women from devastating job loss and career setbacks. Here are a few ways:

• Pass a robust aid package: Lawmakers could provide money to support state and local budgets — and quickly. States face an estimated collective budget shortfall of about $305 billion through next year. The federal government can afford to bail them out and avoid job cuts.

• Revive emergency paid leave: It was included in the original relief package passed in April. Under that law, many workers were able to take up to 12 weeks of guaranteed paid leave if daycares or schools closed due to the pandemic, but the benefit has since expired. Given that many workers don’t receive any leave from their employers, mothers have little recourse if their children have nowhere to go during the workday.

• Get the virus under control: The economy won’t begin to recover until it is, and if testing were more widespread — if the resources to carry it out were bolstered by federal spending and action, instead of left to the states — cases could be reduced. More vaccines could get into more arms if the federal government spent resources and offered coordination on the rollout. 

If the pandemic is the “end of women,” it will be because we made a terrible choice — not to fight the looming crisis when we saw it coming.

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