The pandemic was historically bad for working-class women

By just about every measure other than mortality (which is pretty important!), the COVID-19 pandemic has been harder on women than on men. The majority-female services sector lost jobs at at a faster rate than the majority-male goods-producing sector — which has never happened before in a recession. More women than men have dropped out of the labor force. Even women who held onto their jobs generally had to shoulder an outsized share of the new childcare and schooling burdens.

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Much of the media coverage of this “she-cession” has focused on the tales of professional-class women who have struggled to balance pandemic-imposed home responsibilities with work and in some cases completely dropped out of the workforce. Those struggles are real. But one place where they haven’t really showed up is in the jobs data.

The February 2021 employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics provided a unique opportunity to gauge who was hardest hit by the pandemic recession. February 2020 was the last month of normal life before COVID-19 changed everything, and some labor-market indicators are reported on a not-seasonally adjusted basis that makes year-over-year comparisons the only really meaningful ones.

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The data show a jobs recession that was hardest on women without college degrees and Black and Hispanic women, and was pretty tough on men without college degrees and Hispanic men too. College-educated women, White women and Asian women, on the other hand, experienced smaller jobs losses that were roughly equal to those of their male peers.

One explanation for the big job losses among those with only high school degrees is the ability to work from home. Other surveys have shown this to be closely related to education level — the more education you have, the more likely it is that you can do some or all of your work remotely. Especially in the early days of the pandemic, those who couldn’t work remotely were much more likely to lose their jobs.

At the same time, women with high school degrees were more likely than their male counterparts to have new responsibilities at home imposed by the pandemic (such as taking care of kids whose schools had halted in-person instruction) that were incompatible with non-remote jobs. Even if they didn’t get laid off because of the pandemic — even if they were essential workers — many had to quit.

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These gender disparities in who is expected to take care of the kids exist across the educational spectrum, of course, but women with bachelor’s degrees and higher have been much less likely to leave the labor force, presumably because more of them could work from home (and afford child-care help when they couldn’t). The job losses also fell very unevenly by race and ethnicity. Hispanics have had the toughest time overall, but the real standouts, in a bad way, have been both Black and Hispanic women.

The establishment data are not broken down by education or race, but there’s ample evidence that lower-paid, lower-status jobs were hit hardest. Average pay, which usually falls in a recession, leapt last spring as low-wage jobs disappeared, with April’s gain in real average hourly earnings the biggest ever recorded. More than half the job losses in the health-care sector were at nursing and residential-care facilities, where 80% of employees are women and average weekly earnings of non-supervisory employees just $618.

This past year has been pretty awful for almost all of us, but has placed unique demands on women. In the job market, these have weighed heaviest on the women with the fewest resources. Even as aid pours out of Washington and the economy gains strength, there’s a good chance a lot of them still need help.