Women Outpace Men in Coronavirus Unemployment
/One hundred years after the suffragette movement, women are still feeling the pain.
Recent job losses and furloughs have disproportionately affected women. The service sector, which creates “services” rather than tangible objects, has been hit hard by the cornonavirus and social distancing. The service sector makes up 77% of our economy’s Gross Domestic Product and is responsible for jobs in banking, retail stores, transportation, distribution, and food services, just to name a few. While both women and men lost jobs due to the cornonavirus and social distancing last month, women were impacted much harder because many of their occupations were on the lower end of the corporate ladder. Meaning, higher level managers, of which approximatley 60% are men and 40% are women, are less likely to be laid off since they’ll be needed to strategize the business’s reopeing once things turn around.
There is another factor fueling today’s high number of women filing for unemployment and that is child care. Women are still considered the primary care giver. Recently, child-care facilities and schools have closed, temporarily leaving many children with no one to watch over them. The fact is that women are more likely to leave their job to fultill this role than men. Normally, leaving a job to care for a child would not qualify as a reason to receive unemployment insurance. Fortuantely, the recently passed Coronavirus relief bill, now referred to as the CARES Act, allows these workers to collect unemployment insurance if they take time off of work to care for a child. This is referred to as “Temporary Pandemic Unemployment Compensation.”
The chart below looks at eight industries and breaks them out by gender job loss. You can see that Non-Farm Payrolls and the Leisure & Hospitality sectors experienced the majority of job losses. The most disproportionate job losses among genders came from Retail Trade, Transporation & Warehousing, and Education & Health Services. Interestingly enough, Education & Health Services were hiring men while women were losing their jobs. This also happened in Transporation & Warehousing.
Over the past one hundred years, women have made a lot of progress at work and on the home front. I’d love to have a crystal ball to get a glimpse of what the next one hundred years will look like. I bet it will be amazing!
