The Pandemic Was Historically Bad for Working-Class Women
One year later it’s clear: The pandemic’s biggest job-market victims were Black and Hispanic women, and those without college degrees.
Photographer: Sean Gardner/Getty Images
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 child-care and schooling burdens.
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.