Shecession: More working moms forced to quit jobs due to pandemic
As a social service provider, Colleen Zavodny knows how important it is to take care of her mental health, but the coronavirus pandemic has tested her like nothing else.
“I’ve had a couple nasty, ugly cries where I wonder how am I going to keep managing this,” said Zavodny, of Woodridge, Ill., who runs the YWCA Metropolitan Chicago’s rape crisis center.
Zavodny supervises elearning for her 5-year-old daughter Silvia while working full time for the YWCA from home. She also had been working as a server at a restaurant every other weekend when her ex has custody of their daughter.
When COVID-19 restrictions banned indoor dining in March and again Oct. 23, she lost her second income, which the 38-yearold she had used to pay for day care a few days a week, something she can no longer afford.
“At the beginning of COVID, I was like, OK, go week by week. And then once e-learning started, I was like, OK, let’s just go day by day,” she said. “And there are some days where I’m like, I just have to go forward one hour at a time or one minute at a time.”
Zavodny is like millions of other working mothers whose financial security and career prospects have been upended by the virus, and experts say it could take years for women to recover. In September alone, 865,000 women left the workforce or were laid off nationwide, compared with 216,000 men, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
Called the “shecession” by some economists, the coronavirus pandemic is unlike other modern recessions in that job losses are greatest among women, who dominate jobs that cannot be done remotely, like food service, retail and hospitality.
At the same time, they’re being required to do more at home. As schools and day care centers close, parents — mostly mothers — are forced to take on more responsibility, an escalation in child care needs that hasn’t happened in past recessions.
Some women in two-parent households are being forced to drop out of the workforce altogether, at least temporarily.
“The pandemic has forced millions of families to decide who scales down or drops out of the workforce for the next few months, and it’s going to be mostly women,” said Titan Alon, an economics professor at the University of California at San Diego who has researched the impact of the coronavirus on gender equality.
Early in the pandemic, moms of school-age children from early closure states were about 68% more likely to voluntarily leave their jobs than moms in states that had not yet closed, according to a study by the Minneapolis Federal Reserve. Compared with dads, moms were about 50% more likely to take leave.
The situation hasn’t gotten much better.
A September survey of more than 40,000 North American workers by consulting firm McKinsey found 1 in 3 mothers has considered leaving the workforce or scaling back her career because of the pandemic. Among those considering a change, the majority cite child care as the primary reason.
“Everybody’s doing more right now. But when you already have a double shift, and then you compound that with another double shift, you really get this disparate difference for women,” said Alexis Krivkovich, managing partner at McKinsey and co-author of the report.
Women who reduce their hours or leave the workforce, whether temporarily or permanently, could lose skills, advancement opportunities, wages and benefits. Past recessions, which affected men’s employment more severely than women’s, have reduced the gender pay gap, but this recession could widen the gap again, according to Alon.
“It’s heartbreaking,” said Jacqueline Thomas, a mother of two who left her communications director role at PCMA, a global events company based in Chicago. “I spent a lifetime building a career, getting a master’s degree, working towards this directorship position. When that’s taken away, or you step away from it, you lose a sense of worth.”
Her decision to leave her job in September was based primarily on the well-being of her children, one of whom has special needs, she said. Both children are in a full-time elearning program, which Thomas oversees out of their LaPorte, Indiana, home. Thomas, who is in her mid-30s, and her husband never discussed him leaving his job because his career in the tech industry is more stable and less exposed to shocks from the pandemic. Once her children can transition into a stable schooling situation, Thomas wants to go back to work but said she’s worried about being penalized for stepping away temporarily.
“I have friends that have experienced it, I have family that has experienced it. When home pulls a woman away from the workforce and she comes back, it tends not to be very forgiving,” Thomas said. “It’s hard to explain that gap on the resume.”
If women continue to lose their jobs, scale back their hours or leave their careers, there will be consequences for the economy, businesses, and for women’s long-term financial security and well-being, experts say.
A gap in the unemployment rates between men and women in Illinois began to grow in April and continued to increase throughout the summer. In September, the unemployment rate for Illinois women was 8.6%, compared with 7.7% for men.