Women out of work

NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: women in the workforce. Or maybe women leaving the workforce?

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Millions of Americans have lost their jobs since the pandemic hit, and most of them have been females. Why is that? WORLD’s Anna Johansen Brown did some digging to find out.

AUDIO: Hey guys! Today’s video is going to be all about how I manage working full time as a new mom.

AUDIO: If you just recently started working from home with your kids, give this video a like so I know, so we can support each other.

ANNA JOHANSEN BROWN: YouTube offers an endless stream of young moms with flawless makeup, perfectly styled hair, modern minimalist home decor, and slim coffee mugs inscribed with inspirational quotes. They all have this really perky music playing in the background.

Other videos take a more realistic approach.

AUDIO: I know there are some people that are near perfect and can keep their house clean while they do stuff like this, but I am not one of them. Definitely not one of them.

No matter how they’re packaged, these videos all target what was a growing segment of the workforce. In 2019, a lot of women were juggling jobs and families. A record number, in fact: The U.S. workforce included more women with kids under the age of 6 than ever before.

BATEMAN: Prior to the pandemic, topline measures showed working women were doing fairly well. 

Nicole Bateman is a research analyst with the Brookings Institution.

BATEMAN: Their unemployment rate was at a historic low, it was only 3.4 percent.

But over the past eight months, the number of women in the workforce has plummeted. According to Department of Labor statistics, more than 600,000 women left the workforce in September alone. That’s nearly eight times more than the number of men, which clocked in around 78,000.

BATEMAN: The share of women either working or looking for work has hit lows that we haven’t seen since 1987.

In September, 2.2 million fewer women filled the labor force than a year ago at the same time.

That’s partly because of the kind of jobs women tend to have.

Betsey Stevenson is a professor of economics at the University of Michigan.

STEVENSON: You know, frankly, women do more of the in-person work in the economy than men do. Because they tend to take on caring jobs. And if you’re caring for people, well, you’re with people.

And when the pandemic hit, those jobs evaporated first.

STEVENSON: Women tend to work in industries like health care and education services. Women also hold the majority of jobs in retail sales, and leisure and hospitality.

All of those industries took a beating in the early days of the pandemic.

Nicole Bateman points out that women also hold most of our low-wage jobs.

BATEMAN: Prior to the onset of COVID women comprised 54 percent of the workers earning low wages, even though they are only 47 percent of the workforce overall. 

Low-wage jobs were also among the first to go, early on in the pandemic.

But that doesn’t explain why so many women dropped out of the workforce this fall. Many of them didn’t lose their jobs—they chose to leave them. Not because of worklife, but because of homelife.

Joanna Meyer works with the Denver Institute for Faith and Work.

MEYER: Women are three times more likely to be responsible for the most of the housework and caregiving.

That’s been true for years. But the pandemic has exacerbated the difficulties of balancing family and a full-time job. Many working women hire babysitters, or send their kids to daycare. Both of those options are expensive, and also hard to find these days. So most women rely on other forms of child supervision.

MEYER: For lower income women, many of them relied on the free and reliable childcare that was provided by their local schools.

That, of course, went out the window in April. Even now, many kids haven’t been able to go back to school in person. And Betsey Stevenson points out that, even if they have, that doesn’t solve all the potential problems moms face.

STEVENSON: If your kid was in school, if they get sick, who’s going to stay home with them for two weeks?

For many women, making the decision to leave the workforce isn’t easy. Even if both the husband and wife work, they might rely on the wife’s job benefits—things like insurance and a 401k. And single parents don’t have a second income to fall back on. So the choice between working and staying home with a child is a catch-22.

Nicole Bateman from Brookings says balancing work and family life is a lot for anyone to handle.

BATEMAN: I think that what this crisis highlights is that our economy is not very family-friendly.

But Joanna Meyer with the Denver Institute for Faith and Work sees this whole situation as an opportunity.

MEYER: One of the things that’s valuable, that actually might be good as a result of the pandemic, is that it’s changing our understanding of what effective work looks like. 

All of a sudden, working from home is a viable option for millions of employees. Betsey Stevenson says that flexibility is good for women.

STEVENSON: It becomes much easier now to say, I’m working from home today, my kid is sick. People have been able to spend more time with their family and I, for one, don’t want to go back to spending less time with my kids. 

She hopes this season makes people think.

STEVENSON: What’s it worth leaving our families for a business trip? I think that it might cause us to reevaluate how we pair our work lives with our family lives with our personal lives.

Joanna Meyer hopes employers will also consider making some changes. That might include policies like more flexible work hours or paid family leave.

But it might just be a cultural shift. Meyer says Christian employers especially should be thinking about this.

MEYER: We often talk in the faith community about being pro family. And so that invites us to say, What does it look like to have a healthy approach to caring for both men and women in all of their responsibilities?

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Anna Johansen Brown.

(Photo/iStock)

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