How COVID Has Impacted Women In Work

When COVID-19 first hit, employment rates sank like the Titanic. The number of women aged 25 to 54 shrank by a massive 13% in the first 4 months of 2020. A year later and the figures were 5% lower, with the largest impact on low income and black households. Many women have left the workforce all together. In January of 2020, there were more “prime age” men compared to women in the United States of America. If job losses were spread evenly, around 300k more men than women would have lost work. The number women losing jobs in the work force was 220,000 more than the number of men did.

There are 2 main reasons why it is like this: one reason could be the fact that the concentration of women in the affected industries is especially high, such as the fast food and movie industries. The second, slightly more obvious one, would be that most of the women have children to care for.

Many childcare centres around the world were closed which would lead to the children of the many families where both the parents work, to be left unsupervised and alone. With schools also operating online during the several lockdown periods across the world, it would make sense for one parent to stay home along with the children to take care and oversee the work. The share of women either working or seeking work fell by 2.2 percentage points from January 2020 to January 2021, which was 0.6 percentage points higher in comparison to men. The more surprising figure was that the decrease in “prime aged” women (aged between 25-54) fell by 4 percentage points in the case where the youngest child in the family was aged between 2 and 6 years of age; an explanation for this trend would be that the children are too young to look after themselves and need full time attention and care, and with childcare centres shut, the mothers have to resort to quitting and looking after their family.

The distribution of women in industries only explains a small part of the gender differences in the reduction of the workforce. Women are slightly overrepresented in the leisure and hospitality sectors in which unemployment rose by 24%, however in the health sector job security went relatively unscathed, which is understandable due to many nurses and doctors being overworked, which means they can’t lose any manpower.

When diving deeper into the figures, it becomes clearer that America’s gender inequality is interlinking with its racial disparity. It was discovered by a survey that only 25% of Black and Latino mothers would send their children to school if in-person classes resumed during the lockdown period. This could be due to 2 possible reasons. The first could be that the school is based in a COVID-19 hotspot. The other, more sad, reason could be due to the fact that if a member of a minority family was to contract the disease, they would not receive adequate healthcare due to the colour of their skin.

With the economy slowly recovering, many women will slowly return to work. 9% of prime aged women had to stop working due to shopkeepers to closing shop. Once vaccines become the norm and r rates around the world slowly start to decline, the women should slowly be able to return to work. However, with the women that have left the workforce, they may find it harder to return, which then entrenches the existing inequalities.