From health care to education to employment to domestic violence and mental health, years of women’s progress backslid thanks to the coronavirus.
Thanks to the pandemic, women have a magnified set of problems to tackle. Once it is over, women are going to have to fight their way back into the workforce.
Ayear ago this month, the female-forward energy was crackling. The Equal Rights Amendment was in play again — nearly 100 years after it was written. Virginia had just become the 38th state to ratify the amendment, and there was a possibility that it would finally be added to the Constitution.
The field of presidential candidates was more female than ever before. And the frigid streets of Washington filled once again with pink pussy hats and optimism — perhaps too much optimism — for what was becoming an iconic, annual tradition: the Women’s March.
“This is the last Women’s March we’re going to need because Trump is going to be gone by this time next year,” Joann Edmunds, 69, a Roanoke resident who attended the march with three friends, told a Washington Post reporter last year. “Once he’s out of office, there won’t be the same need for it.”
If only.
Edmunds’s prediction came true: There will be no official Women’s March after the inauguration this year.
But that’s not because the fight is over. While President Trump will be gone and Kamala Harris will have made history as the nation’s first female vice president, feminists declaring victory right now would be as cringy as President George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” moment in 2003.
The pandemic makes a march of such scale too dangerous — even though a year later, the well-being of American women is still in peril and reason, more than ever, for an uprising.
Though women resisted, persisted and continued to make progress in politics, policy and the workforce all four years that a misogynist was in office, it was the coronavirus
(and Trump’s handling of it) that has profoundly worsened the lives of women everywhere.
“Every day brings new examples of the ways in which women are being left behind by the world’s response to the pandemic,” philanthropist Melinda Gates wrote in Foreign Affairs.
From health care to education to employment to domestic violence and mental health, years of women’s progress backslid thanks to the coronavirus.
Women were just barely the majority — 50.04% — of the American workforce last January. In April, 16.2% of women were unemployed, which meant women lost about 11 million jobs that month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Men lost 9 million jobs during the same time, and the total 20 million jobs lost is an American record since World War II, according to the BLS.
The losses were even more intense for Black (16.6%) and Latina (20.2%) women, according to BLS data.
The first wave of virus shutdowns happened in female-dominated fields like child care, retail and hospitality. That’s different from past recessions that were harder on men, when male-dominated manufacturing industries collapsed. This time, men had a larger percentage of the jobs that could be done via telecommuting, positioning their careers to survive a pandemic better. By the summer, economists were calling this pandemic’s economic crisis the “shecession.”
Women saw the already unequal burden of second-shift housework pile even higher. To-go breakfasts and school lunches vanished, and homes became three-meals-a-day mess halls as families went into lockdown — emphasis on the mess.
When it became clear that most schools weren’t going to have students back on campus, another wave of women’s job losses hit as they quit their jobs to focus on their homebound children’s education and care. In September, 865,000 women left the labor force, more than four times the number of men who left, according to an analysis by the National Women’s Law Project.
“Women continue to disproportionately suffer the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Gema Zamarro, adjunct senior economist for the USC Dornsife Center for
Economic and Social Research who co-wrote a study on women and COVID-19, said in a news release. “This could have important implications for the recovery of the economy and represent a significant step back in terms of gender equality.”
It’s time for the same level of outrage that boiled us when a reality-show star, who bragged about grabbing women’s genitals, took America’s highest office, right?
“For us, marching is a tactic, a tactic that met the moment, at the time,” said Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director of the Women’s March, when she described the energy and momentum of that day in 2017 when thousands of marchers overwhelmed D.C. in a sea of pink the day after Trump took office.
“For us, marching this year didn’t meet the moment,” Carmona said. “That’s one of the things we lost, thanks to COVID.”
And thanks to the pandemic, women have a magnified set of problems to tackle. Through meetings, coalitions and remote work, the groups involved with the Women’s March have found other ways to keep fighting, Carmona said.
Once the pandemic is over, women are going to have to fight their way back into the workforce. The wage gap will have grown, millions of child care slots will have been lost, and the balance of housework will once again be out of whack.
No one needs hats and a big street party right now.
“I’m not really in a partying mood,” Carmona said. “I’m in a let’s-get-to-work-as-quickly-aspossible mood.”