Work recovery to be uneven for women
After more rejections than she could count, Brianna Lopez finally got a job as a server in October, ending months of unemployment. But the celebration didn’t last long.
Three days later, the mother of three, who lives in southwest Houston, was forced to quit to care for her children, whose school was shut down by a confirmed COVID-19 case. Five more closures over the next few months made it near impossible to find a steady job.
“You just become unreliable,” she said.
Lopez is among the millions of women who lost jobs when the pandemic
broke out last spring and have struggled to return to work as they contend with child care, home schooling and few openings in the hard-hit service industries where many work. Even as vaccines bring COVID-19 under control and the economy picks up, women may not re-enter the labor force as child care remains a challenge and employers look askance at long bouts of unemployment and gaps in résumés, economists said.
The result: a slower recovery. “In December of 2019, women were half of all employees in the U.S., so, we‘re not the minority workforce. We are half of workers,” said Kathryn Anne Edwards, an economist for RAND Corp., a California-based think tank. “If 2 million women leave the labor force, and they don’t come back, that clips economic growth for everybody.”
The pandemic-induced recession has taken on an unusual female character, prompting analysts and economists to call it a “she-cession.” When businesses shut down last spring, some 2 million more women lost jobs than men, according to the Labor Department. And in September, when schools reopened and resumed remote learning, employment among women fell by more than 180,000, even as it rose by 450,000 among men.
Those trends represent a break with typical recessions, said Pia Orrenius, senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Men, who dominate cyclical industries such as manufacturing and construction, have historically borne the brunt of downturns.
“Women are typically in stable occupations like teachers and service industries that are not impacted by the business cycle,” Orrenius said. “Usually the service sector is stable in a recession, but this time we’re seeing the reverse.”
More than 3 million women have dropped out of the labor force during the pandemic, which economists attribute in part to limited access to child care. Half of mothers forced by the pandemic to quit jobs cited the closing of schools or day cares as one of the reasons, according to a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit research and policy group in San Francisco.
Shronda Williams, 47, who lives in north Houston, left her job as a medical assistant in March 2020 after her daughter’s school switched to virtual learning. Even after in-person instruction resumed, she kept her daughter home in January because cases were rising and her daughter has asthma, putting her at risk of serious complications from COVID-19.
Williams has burned through her savings, juggling bills and getting some financial help from her brother. She wants to get back to work, but she’s worried the schools may close again as she hears news that more strains of the virus are spreading through Houston.
“I knew once they sent the kids home from school, that was going to send me home,” Williams said. “Because if I go back to work, what’s going to happen to my kid? I’m a single parent.”
Women with children have the lowest labor force participation rate, just 72.4 percent in January, down 2.3 percentage points from February 2020, according to the analytics and polling company Gallup. In contrast, men with children had a labor force participation rate of 92.7 percent, down less than a percentage point from last year.
Even women without children may struggle to re-enter the labor market, economists said. Women tend to work in public-facing jobs, such as health care, leisure and hospitality. But for those women, who have sat out of the workforce for six months or longer, it could be harder to get back in.
Employers tend to see such a large gap in work history as a red flag, even if the person was unemployed through no fault of their own, said Ofer Sharone, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, whose research focuses on long-term unemployment.
More to do
Long-term unemployment was a particular problem as the U.S. economy recovered from the Great Recession more than a decade ago, peaking in 2010 when 6.8 million Americans were out of work for more than six months. In February, more than 4 million Americans were unemployed long term, quadruple the number of a year earlier.
“At the height of the (Great) Recession, employers were forgiving, but as soon as the recession was over, and overall unemployment was back down, there was a lot more stigmatizing of anyone who was still unemployed,” Sharone said. “If you were just unlucky enough to not get hired right away in the first wave, and it took you longer, then you could really be stuck.”
This is something that weighs on Veronica McClendon, who has been out of work since March. McClendon, who lives in northwest Houston, worked in child development licensing foster homes for the state, making sure the homes met safety standards, and investigated cases of abuse and neglect, which also required home visits.
She was laid off about two weeks before the pandemic-related closures started.
McClendon, 54, said she applies for at least six jobs every month, seeking positions in day cares and elementary schools, but nothing has panned out. Despite having a degree in child development from Texas Southern University and experience, she worries that a yearlong gap on her résumé and her age might give employers pause.
“This is the first time I’ve had to look for a job over 50,” McClendon said. “I know they say it doesn’t matter, but it does, and being a Black woman over 50, it won’t be as easy as it was when I was 23 or 24.”
The recently approved $1.9 trillion in stimulus spending is aimed in large part at avoiding the slow, painful recovery that followed the Great Recession and revving up the economy so unemployed Americans such as McClendon can get back to work fast. The spending package also includes $39 billion for child care relief with the aim of helping women return to work.
This funding is a good first step, said Edwards of RAND Corp., but there is still work to be done.
“The problem is we don’t expect this to be a light switch from no care or no schooling to (access to) care,” Edwards said. “We still don’t have universal access to affordable child care, universal pre-K programs and paid family leave.”
‘10 steps back’
Lopez, 29, struggled to pay for day care while she looked for work. She applied for federally funded child care assistance available to qualified Texas residents, but the waiting list is months long.
Ultimately, she and her husband decided that day care was too costly at $270 a week and that it would be easier for one of them to stay home with the children, ages 2, 7 and 10. They agreed it made more sense for her to stay home because her husband was working in demolition and had an easier time finding jobs.
As of now, Lopez is looking for a nightshift serving or bartending job, so she can watch her children during the day until her husband comes home. But she worries abrupt school closures could still happen.
Before COVID, Lopez said, it wasn’t difficult to find a decentpaying job as a server and balance that with taking care of her children. But the pandemic threw off that balance, creating obstacles to work and access to child care that she had never faced.
“You know, we (women) were moving up in the chain,” Lopez said, “And COVID hit and it’s just like, we took 10 steps back.”