WASHINGTON — Women who lost their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic could be waiting until 2023 to work again, experts warn, even if economic initiatives President Joe Biden has proposed become law.
It could take more than two years for women’s employment to return to pre-pandemic levels because the industries women worked in were hit the hardest, according to the National Women’s Law Center, an organization that publishes monthly reports on how the pandemic is affecting women’s employment. Most of the job losses were in the hospitality, education, health, government and retail industries, the organization says.
Initiatives in two proposals Biden has put forward, a jobs plan and a separate families plans that would greatly expand access to benefits such as child care and paid family leave, are projected by economists to help with employment down the line. But they say the measures would not do much to speed up the process of getting women who lost their jobs back into the workforce.
“They’re not really about getting the economy back to full employment sooner,” said Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi, who is supportive of the Biden proposals yet acknowledges they are aimed at addressing longer-term economic growth and income and wealth inequality.
Zandi said he expects both male and female employment to recover “by early 2023, about 2 years from now,” though he assessed, “Male employment will likely fully recover a few months before female employment given male-dominated industries got hit less hard during the pandemic.”
Women have left or lost at least 4.2 million jobs since the beginning of the pandemic. Roughly 2 million of those women are still unemployed, according to employment experts.
In a report based on April labor data, the National Women’s Law Center said women gained 60.5% of the jobs available that month. But the group said it would be 28 months before women reached their February 2020 level of employment based on that data.
“For most months we haven’t been adding women’s jobs at the same rate we’ve been adding mens’ jobs,” said Jasmine Tucker, research director of the National Women’s Law Center and coauthor of the report.
The Biden administration has said it is not rattled by weaker-than-anticipated job growth in April. At the same time, it has argued that last month’s report underscored the need for the president’s initiatives, including emergency relief funds that Congress approved in March.
“We don’t want to make too much out of one month’s data, and we have seen that there have been some good months for women’s employment and some months that haven’t been too great. But overall, when you look at the trend, you have seen women, including mothers, coming back into the labor force as the vaccine gets out and as it’s safer to work, and as more things reopen and as jobs come back,” Heather Boushey, who sits on the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said in an interview.
“We are still over 8 million jobs lower than we were pre-pandemic, so we need to bump up all the kinds of jobs, and that’s going to help both women and men regain their footing in the labor market,” Boushey added.
VOLATILE RECOVERY
With vaccinations on the rise and the federal government calling for an ease in health and safety restrictions, jobs in some industries dominated by women are reemerging, especially in hospitality and government. But analysts and economists say the market is still volatile.
Hospitality was the largest driver last month of employment for women, yet most of the jobs in the industry went to men, according to the National Women’s Law Center. Meanwhile, other industries continued to shed jobs in April. The group said that all of the retail job losses last month were suffered by women.
Mark Mathews, vice president of research development and industry analysis at the National Retail Federation, countered that while retailers at the height of the pandemic cut down on the number of cashiers that they employed — nearly three in four of whom are women — many of the businesses now say that they are currently struggling to fill open positions.
“More women have come back into the retail workforce than men,” he said. “Over a million women have come back, versus 930,000 men, into the retail workforce. The issue is that more women lost jobs.”
Republicans argue that generous federal unemployment benefits are discouraging people from working. In surveys, women who express interest in working but are not doing so at the time say it is because they do not currently have access to affordable childcare. They have also cited school closures and concerns about contracting COVID-19 as barriers to working during the pandemic.
The White House says its plans to invest in home health care, offer up to $8,000 per family for child care, make preschool free to everyone and provide up to 12 weeks of paid family and sick leave are essential to helping women who left the workforce during and before the pandemic.
“There is robust empirical evidence that these kinds of investments support women’s labor supply by helping workers – especially women – address day-in, day-in challenge of caring for their family and doing their job,” Boushey said in a statement.
In a report, Zandi assessed that the initial pace of job growth would be nearly the same with or without Biden’s jobs and infrastructure plan now that recovery legislation the president put forward is being implemented. However, he told McClatchy that if Biden’s plan that includes child care and paid leave were to pass in combination with those proposals, employment levels would go back to where they were a few months quicker.
“In terms of jobs, with the infrastructure plan the economy recovers the jobs lost in the pandemic recession by early 2023, not much different than without the plan,” Zandi wrote. “But the plan does result in substantially more jobs mid-decade, with employment under Biden’s term as president increasing by 13.5 million jobs.”
That compares to 11.4 million jobs without Biden’s plan and 10.5 million jobs if his rescue plan had not become law.
RETRAINING WOMEN
Liberal women’s groups argue that paid family and medical leave, like what Biden has proposed, and higher wages are also needed to get and keep women in the workforce.
“If we just provide the childcare but people are going back to jobs that pay substandard wages, have no benefits, have no health coverage, have no time off, then it means that they stay trapped and their ability to move up their ability to advance, to be on a job path that leads over time to higher and more sustainable family living wages and communities, that gets diminished,” said Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families.
Biden also requested $40 billion in his infrastructure proposal to help dislocated workers learn new skills and connect them with career services. The president’s job training initiative focuses on industries such as renewable energy, manufacturing, and caregiving that the administration anticipates will be in high demand.
C. Nicole Mason, president of Institute for Women’s Policy Research, said skills, retraining and apprenticeship programs will be “critically important” to employing women who have been without jobs for more than two and a half years, especially the Black and Latina women who have been experiencing higher rates of unemployment rates.
“We know after the 2008 recession, even when we were in recovery mode … those women were still left behind, and that is my fear,” she said. “So even after 23 months, it is possible that those women, those groups of women, Black and Latina women, it will take longer for them to reenter sustained employment.”
