Black, minority women left behind in COVID-19 job recovery
Nine months into the COVID-19 pandemic, women of colour in Canada still face far higher unemployment than white women, official data shows, in part because they tend to work jobs in hard-hit sectors and often care for children or relatives.
The unemployment rate for minority women was 10.5 per cent in November, compared with 6.2 per cent for white women, according to Statistics Canada data provided to
Reuters. Women of colour also had a slightly higher unemployment rate than their male counterparts, who had a jobless rate of 10 per cent.
Canada has recouped more than 80 per cent of the jobs lost at the height of the crisis, but many minority women have not returned to work. “What we're seeing ... is the unequal impact of this pandemic on diverse groups of Canadians,” said Lynn Barr-Telford, an assistant chief statistician at StatCan, in an interview before the latest data was released. “These inequities predate
COVID ... but they've been further exacerbated by COVID.”
StatCan added a question on race to its monthly job survey in July. The first survey found South Asian women had among the highest unemployment rates in Canada at 20.4 per cent and Black women at 18.6 per cent. Four months later, the unemployment rate for Black women remains one of the highest at 13.4 per cent.
Chinese-Canadian women, meanwhile, are the furthest from their pre-pandemic employment levels with a jobless rate of 10.2 per cent in November.
Indigenous Canadians also face disproportionate negative impacts on employment from the pandemic, with the unemployment rate for Indigenous women averaging 16.8 per cent from June to August, StatCan said in a separate report released in November.
White women have fared better as “they tend to be in better paid jobs that are less precarious and they have more resources at their disposal,” said Wendy Cukier,
founder of the Diversity Institute at the Ted Rogers School of Management.