5 takeaways:
➀ Low-wage women and women of color were most likely to lose their jobs or quit to care for family during the pandemic. Even before the pandemic, half of all working women – 28 million – were in low-income jobs, with median earnings of $10.93 per hour. Then 2.3 million women lost their jobs – but women of color, young women and women with disabilities were hit the hardest. Catarina Saraiva of Bloomberg News recommends journalists track these data using the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics website and particularly a new tool called Data Finder, located under the Data Tools tab. She also recommended following collections of BLS data, using the series Data ID number, to track statistics dating back to 1948.
➁ Four times as many women as men exited the labor force in September 2020. That “not coincidentally coincides with the return to distance learning and other caregiving responsibilities,” said Melissa Boteach, vice president of the National Women’s Law Center. As of February 2021, women’s unemployment rates were higher than men’s, and the rates were highest for Latinas (8.5%) Black women (8.9%), women ages 20-24 (9.1%), and women with disabilities (13.9%), Boteach said. (The March 1 data can be found here.)
➂ Jobs are not coming back as fast for women. Some of those lost jobs will not return; women will lose them to robots or to men. Women find it harder to reenter the work force after a long absence, have lost out on promotions and may have tapped their retirement savings. The result could be a growth in the $70,000 wealth gap that already separates the sexes, warned Camille Busette, director of the Race, Prosperity and Inclusion Initiative at the Brookings Institution.
➃ The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 will stabilize the economy, but wider policy changes will be required to help women recover from the pandemic. “Social networks work differently for middle class women and for … white women than they do for low wage women or women of color,” Busette said. “So, we have to think about that when we’re thinking about policies that will help improve the situation for low wage women post-COVID.” The temporary child care credit included in President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package should be made permanent, and other measures – such as paid leave, retraining and retirement accounts for those not offered them at work – will be needed to fight female poverty, Busette said.
➄ Child care should be viewed as essential infrastructure for a modern economy. “We found $50 billion to bail out the airline industries very, very quickly before we found $50 billion to bail out the child care sector,” Boteach said. But staying home with children is not an option for the majority of American women, Boteach said. Two-thirds of U.S. families rely on a working mother’s income, and women are the sole or primary breadwinner in 40% of households. “For Black women in particular, it is much higher,” she said. The U.S. economy has changed in the 50 years since President Richard Nixon vetoed a child care bill, saying the government should stay out of family affairs. Science has shown that children do not begin learning when they enter school – they are learning from birth. Child care is education, a public good that is as vital to the U.S. economy as roads, bridges or national defense, she argued.
This program is funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and Heising-Simons Foundation. NPF is solely responsible for the content.
