For too long, women have struggled to create equity in the workplace, only to lose it now: The coronavirus pandemic has set back working women by decades, according to a new study by the California Commission on Women and Girls.
Women in the workplace were forced to leave their jobs during the pandemic, and many returned to a pre-WWII set of duties — the kind that too often falls to the women of the household such as child care, medical care for ailing family, teaching and cleaning. For example, while schools were closed, more than 41% of California’s working mothers reported providing extra childcare, while only 17% of fathers did.
This cannot stand: California’s working women cannot be treated as second-class citizens when it is their vital work that contributed to making this state the fourth-largest economy in the world.
Women are overwhelmingly labeled as “essential workers” in jobs such as teaching, nursing and childcare. California women get the job done only to have their needs abandoned so they can pick up the slack at home, too. That is an unconscionable continuation of a tired legacy and devalues the work women do every day.
“It is critical to understand that it is not just certain professions or service workers that we call essential — it was women who dominate those sectors as employees, and it is women who are essential to the functioning of our economy,” said the commission’s executive director, Holly Martinez.
Women prior to the pandemic were employed in California at least 20% less than men, which means women struggled more often with poverty, and women of color disproportionately so. Evidence also suggests that as an occupation becomes female-dominated, its wages decline.
If all working women and working single mothers in California earned the same as men in comparable roles, the commission’s report found, the state’s poverty rate for working women would be reduced by about 40%.
According to a Brookings Institute analysis of 2018 American Community Survey data, created before COVID-19, nearly half of all working women — approximately 28 million — worked in low-wage, “pink collar” jobs, with median earnings of only $10.93 per hour.
Additionally, the estimated average earnings increase would be 15.8 % of all working women if they earned the same as men for comparable work. That’s an additional $68.45 billion — or 2.2% of the state’s economy.
“Pandemic unemployment affected poor women, and women without college degrees, hardest,” Martinez said. “Frontline and service sectors referred to as essential workers, were the most impacted and many of these sectors are occupationally segregated, with women making up more than 70% of a particular industry’s workforce in some cases.”
Women leave the workforce for a number of reasons, but there is an overwhelming number who leave because child care is an absolute necessity, and increasingly difficult to afford. As the partner who makes lower wages, a woman is often the half of a partnership that is expected to care for the home and for the children.
This creates an economically debilitating status quo that working women can never overcome if we are pushed back into the home every time the American economy takes a hit.
Between the onset of the pandemic and January 2022, men regained all jobs they had lost due to the public health crisis, while more than 1.1 million women left the labor force during that span, according to an analysis by the National Women’s Law Center of the latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report. That accounts for 63 percent of all jobs lost.
If Gov. Gavin Newsom and the legislature, so proud of California’s place among the world’s biggest economic players, wishes the state to rise even further — or even just to hold its own — then his government must recognize the essential work women perform and their inalienable place in that system.
