International Women’s Day on Monday coincides with the anniversary of the coronavirus gripping the global economy—and one of the most turbulent 12-month periods for working women in recent memory.
Millions of women have lost jobs or left the workforce, and working mothers have endured a caregiving crunch as the pandemic has thrust schooling, childcare and work under one roof for so many families. Many men, and fathers, have faced similar challenges.
Some trends could help working women: The number of female CEOs leading major companies is on the rise. Meanwhile, the grand, yearlong remote work experiment many employers and employees have undertaken could be a precursor to more flexibility in juggling work and life post-pandemic—a potential boon for women at work and at home.
Here is a snapshot of how working women have fared over the past year and what the pandemic portends for their careers longer term:
The ‘She-Cession’
Women usually fare better than men in recessions. But the one triggered by the coronavirus has been different. Women have lost a disproportionate number of jobs, partly because women make up more of the lower-income service and retail positions that vanished as Covid-19 gripped the economy. And some mothers of young children have reduced hours or stopped working altogether.
At its peak last spring, unemployment for women stood at 15%, compared with 13% for men. Though that gender gap in the unemployment rate has since closed, that is largely a factor of so many women dropping out of the workforce, economists say. Women’s participation in the labor force has slipped to 57%, the lowest it has been since 1988, according to an analysis of government data by the National Women’s Law Center. Among mothers with children under 13 years old, labor-force participation declined 3.4 percentage points between February and October of last year, while dropping 1.4 points for prime-age fathers, according to analysis by economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
In all, more than 2.3 million women have dropped out of the labor force during the pandemic, compared with 1.8 million men, according to the National Women’s Law Center report.
Economic Implications
Those figures spell big changes for the U.S. labor force, the economy, and women’s recent gains in the workplace. Just before the pandemic struck, at the end of 2019, women held more U.S. jobs than men for the first time in nearly a decade, reflecting in part growth in services industries that employ higher numbers of women, such as healthcare. A year since the pandemic began, though, men have edged out women in making up the majority of jobs.
“If we don’t get all the workers back, we can never have a V-shaped recovery,” says Betsey Stevenson, economics professor at the University of Michigan, referring to a quick and sustained bounceback after a sharp decline. “Everybody should be worried about making sure that we don’t leave workers behind,” she said.
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The Working Mother Juggle
For many women, the disruption caused by the coronavirus has shown how stubborn traditional gender roles and pay disparities can be—and how women’s careers often take a back seat when duty calls at home. The pandemic crunch has been especially hard on single parents, many of them women. Having to hire sitters or paying for online classes they wouldn’t need if their children were in school has also hit the finances of working parents, particularly mothers.
Without schools or caregivers to rely on for much of the past year, some women have made painful career choices. A McKinsey & Co. survey of more than 40,000 North American workers last year found more than one in four women were considering downshifting their careers or leaving the workforce completely.
More Female Business Leaders
Women, however, had made gains in the highest echelons of the business world this past year. At last count, a record 40 women were running Fortune 500 companies, and two Black women will soon be joining that still-small, exclusive club: Former Starbucks operating chief Rosalind Brewer, who becomes CEO of Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. on March 15; and JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Thasunda Brown Duckett, who has been tapped to head the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America, or TIAA, starting next month.
Women now lead companies behind some of the biggest and most visible consumer brands during the pandemic, including Carol Tomé, who became chief executive of United Parcel Service Inc. in June; Linda Rendle, Clorox Co. ’s new CEO as of last fall; Karen Lynch, who took the helm of CVS Health Corp. in February. More than in most sectors, women have made big strides in the senior ranks of banks and retailers, getting promoted and recruited into roles that put them on the leadership track.
Write to Vanessa Fuhrmans at [email protected]
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