A perfect storm for women in the workforce
December job losses for women show the startling impact of COVID-19 on the service economy. Two Carolina experts shed light on the dire situation.
Though job losses as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic stalled over the summer, December 2020 showed the first drop in the labor force since May, and with those losses came a troubling statistic — they were all women.
According to a report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, women lost 156,000 jobs in December while men gained 16,000, for a net loss of 140,000 jobs, all represented by women workers. The losses come mainly from retail, leisure, hospitality and government sectors, industries which predominately employ women.
“This trend is due to the nature of the jobs that have been most affected by the pandemic,” says Arne Kalleberg, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Sociology. “They require face-to-face customer contact or travel, and with the need to physically distance, demand for these things is down. As the service industry is heavily dominated by women, they have been the most impacted.”
Arne Kalleberg (pictured) said December’s downturn is likely due to Thanksgiving travel, which led to a nationwide spike in COVID-19 cases.
The National Women’s Law Center’s analysis of bureau statistics showed women accounted for 55% of the 9.6 million net jobs lost in 2020. Most of those jobs were lost between February and April 2020, and the economy began to improve in May. Kalleberg says December’s downturn is likely due to Thanksgiving travel, which led to a nationwide spike in COVID-19 cases.
The nation hasn’t seen such a stark economic decline since the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, in which men initially lost more jobs because of the impact on the manufacturing sector. Women lost jobs, too, says Kalleberg, but not until later in the recession.
“Manufacturing is a relatively small proportion of the labor force right now, but manufacturing jobs haven’t been as heavily impacted because you can still produce things even though demand might not be high,” he says.
Women are also more likely to hold part-time and temporary jobs, says Kalleberg, which are often the first jobs employers cut in a tough economy.
“All of these things combine to produce a perfect storm for women,” he says.
Adding to that perfect storm is the reality that women carry the most responsibility for childcare and other familial caretaking, says Gloria Thomas, director of the Carolina Women’s Center. When the pandemic forced schools to close, many felt they had no choice but to leave the workforce to manage their families.
Women are in survival mode right now, she says.
“By and large, we’re still in a society where mothers are handling the bulk of child-rearing and much of the family household duties. For single moms, this is particularly hard, because no one can take over to help. When you leave the work force, how do you put food on the table and keep a roof over your head and manage the virtual schooling that’s supposed to take place? If you keep your job, your kids may be at home unsupervised, and you’re in danger of catching the virus when you’re face-to-face. The drastic impact on families is huge.”
Job loss can lead to what Kalleberg calls a scarring effect, which can make it hard to catch up in terms of wages and career advancement and difficult for others to regain what they’ve lost. Young workers starting careers may enter the job market in a recession and see slower professional growth than they would have in a healthy economy, and seasoned employees can end up reentering the market behind where they’d been.
For women, that’s a precarious position, says Thomas, particularly for women of color who are at the bottom of earning statistics, making it hard for them to overcome an already unsteady economic position.
“The drastic impact on families is huge,” said Gloria Thomas (pictured).
“When women step out of the workforce, whether voluntarily or after job loss, going back in is a big challenge. You’re often not going back into your previous salary, and you’re expected to start at a lower position and a lower rank,” she says. “It’s hard to determine whether we’ll see the same impact from this pandemic that we do when women step out of the workforce because of their own plans to stop working while they raise families.”
Though the pandemic is far from over, Kalleberg says he thinks the nation is through the worst of the job loss. It’s unclear when jobs will begin to return and how industries may shift as a result of the pandemic. Parts of the service economy may remain scaled back, now that we’re nearly a year into online working and learning.
“We’ve been in the service economy for quite a while, and customers are an important part of a service economy. But we might not travel to conferences the way we used to, if we can Zoom in, and we might not use the service industry the way we did, now that we have Uber Eats and Door Dash,” he says. “Our shift to an online economy has been accelerated by this pandemic.”
