Women hurt by pandemic the most
The claim: “You’ve had over 2 million women drop out of the workforce during this pandemic.” — U.S. Rep. Colin Allred of Texas.
In advocating for the $2 trillion Build Back Better bill, Allred, D-dallas, has emphasized the devastating economic effects of the pandemic as a reason Americans need some of the social safeguards guaranteed in it. Allred pointed out the pandemic’s disproportionate economic effect on women while speaking on MSNBC. Politifact rating: Mostly true. Allred accurately cited a comparison of the number of women in the labor force from February 2020 to February 2021.
More recent data, however, indicates many women have rejoined the labor force since February and the net number of women who dropped out of the workforce is a lower number, but not far off from Allred’s 2 million. Roughly 1.8 million fewer women ages 16 and over are in the workforce compared with February 2020.
Discussion
Democrats and Republicans in Congress have been deadlocked over the legislation, championed by President Joe Biden, which would fund Democratic social and economic goals, including free preschool education.
When asked about the statistics, Allred’s office pointed to an April Pew Research Center article that found, in an analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, a net 2.4 million women dropped out of the workforce from February 2020 to February 2021.
If you wanted to update those numbers, there were 75,737,000 women working in October 2021. The difference between that February 2020 value — before the March 2020 plummet — and
October 2021 is nearly 1.8 million women.
So, there were 1.8 million fewer women in the labor force in October than in February 2020, showing that a significant number of women have rejoined the workforce since February 2021, but the number of women working is still much lower than pre-pandemic levels.
Experts say many women dropped out of the workforce to take care of their children at the beginning of the pandemic, when many schools closed and children learned virtually.
Many economists have tied the September 2020 decline of women in the labor force to the start of school, when 865,000 women dropped out of the workforce compared with 216,000 men.
Mothers have not seen the same economic recovery non-parents and fathers experienced. A February 2021 study from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that if recovery had been similar for mothers as it had been for non-parent women, the December labor force participation rate would have been 2 percentage points higher than the actual rate. About 700,000 more workingage women would have been in the workforce then.
While economic conditions have changed since the pandemic’s beginning, economist Kathryn Edwards at the RAND Corporation noted women still face pandemic-related challenges to rejoining the workforce. This includes waiting for guidance on and the opportunity to vaccinate their children, finding child care after the pandemic exacerbated staffing challenges in the child care industry and dealing with schools temporarily closing, requiring a parent to be home with their child.