Fed: Pandemic recession particularly hurt women

WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell expressed concern Monday that the pandemic recession has had an unusually harmful economic effect on women, who have been forced to shoulder additional responsibilities for childcare, forcing many of them to leave work.

“As schools closed and childcare services shuttered during the worst of the pandemic, that added responsibility and stress made working more difficult for some and took many away from their jobs,” Powell said in remarks to a Fed conference on gender and the economy. “These burdens are real and have been an additional challenge during an already challenging time.”

Women, particularly mothers of young children, are still less likely to be working or looking for work than are fathers or women without children. Childcare has become increasingly expensive and difficult to find, with many school after-care programs having yet to fully reopen. During August and September, working mothers lost jobs even though the nation’s overall unemployment rate fell and an average of 400,000 jobs were added each month.

The departure of so many mothers from the workforce is a big reason why the proportion of Americans who are either working or looking for work remains below pre-pandemic levels even while employers are scrambling to fill a near-record total of available jobs.

When the pandemic recession struck in March 2020, women, who were more likely to hold frontline jobs in health care, at grocery stores and in other public-facing industries, suffered greater job losses than men, the reverse of what happens in most recessions, Powell noted. In April 2020, the unemployment rate for women was 16.1%, much higher than 13.6% for men, though the rates are now nearly equal.