Workforce and Economic Recovery From COVID

"It was one of the most widely telegraphed risks at the onset of the pandemic: Women, who seemed to suffer less from the COVID-19 disease, would probably pay a steeper economic price than men. The clues wee hiding in plain sight."

"Women make up a larger share of workers in industries that ground to a halt, and they typically shoulder more of the unpaid labor at home."

"It would be a greater challenge for them to both keep their jobs and carry on working."

Elisa Martinuzzi, finance columnist, Bloomberg Opinion

Getty/Noam Galai    A woman and child in New York City, August 17, 2020

• The COVID-19 pandemic has dealt a striking blow to a child care sector that was already failing to support all families, and 4.5 million child care slots could be lost permanently.
• There were nearly 10 million mothers of young children in the labor force in 2019. This report explores how insufficient child care could affect their work, their wages, their long-term economic outcomes, and the economic recovery.
• This report estimates that the risk of mothers leaving the labor force and reducing work hours in order to assume caretaking responsibilities amounts to $64.5 billion per year in lost wages and economic activity.
• Without both immediate and long-term action to shore up the child care infrastructure and establish more progressive work-family policies, the United States cannot achieve continued economic growth nor protect and advance gender equity.    Center for American Progress

"Some of the women who were laid off are actually not looking anymore, that's deeply concerning.""If we don't get women back to work in the types of numbers we saw before … we won't get the economic growth that we really need." "Certainly, child care is factoring into that. If we don't have child care, if we don't have children in schools, that work does fall predominantly, in most cases, to women."                                                                                                               "And, so those women don't really have a choice, particularly if they work outside of the home."                                                                                                              Jennifer Reynolds, CEO of Toronto Financial International

A mother works from home in northern England while her two sons complete home-school activities. As schools around the world closed last spring, parents who could work from home had to juggle remote jobs and sudden home-schooling responsibilities. In many cases, women were saddled with the latter. (Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images)

The United Nations' COVID-19 Global Gender Response Tracker outlines that government responses to the global pandemic has realized few policies being enacted to specifically target women in the workforce. Roughly 200 countries set up social-protection and labour-market measures which resulted in fewer than one in five out of the 1,300 enacted, being 'gender sensitive' such that they failed to include women's economic security and responsibility for unpaid care.

 

Despite hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus, equivalent to over ten percent of annual GDP in the larger European Union economies, employment slumped dramatically in retail, tourism and hospitality services, sectors where women comprise over 60 percent of the workforce. Where male unemployment in the EU is now 7.2 percent, for women it is now 8.1 percent. In those instances where women retained employment, many among them were forced by circumstances to peel back hours.

 

An increase in caregiving and tutoring school-age children have added to women's responsibilities. The International Labour Organization studied monthly wages across 28 European countries, and their analysis indicates that earning subsidies included, women on average experienced a 6.9 percent decline in wages resulting from working fewer hours as compared with a 4.7 percent decline in men's wages in the first and second quarters of this past novel coronavirus year. 

In Germany in the first half of 2020 women's wages declined 8.6 percent, close to twice that of their male counterparts, while in the U.K., women's earnings declined by 12.9 percent, almost double the drop men realized. The rate at which women have been slipping out of the labour force altogether is concerning. The U.S., Canada and Japan have seen the gap increase between active men and women in their labour force. 

 

Four percent of women who lost employment during the pandemic, according to one European survey, simply halted their search for work, in comparison to a mere one percent of men.

As an attempted antidote, childcare centres in the UK. were exempted from paying property taxes through 2021 with the government additionally granting childcare tax credits to families. Measures to prevent centres from closing, ensuring that families could find affordable child care did help women to maintain their employment, as per a study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics. 

 

Offering subsidies turned out particularly useful as pandemic-hit incomes declined, given the steep cost of childcare for preschool children.

In the United Kingdom, retail, hospitality and leisure businesses were eligible as well for cash grants up to 25,000 pounds, aiding companies to retain their staff. The government of Australia ensured that 16 of 36 policy measures were sensitive to gender requirements with the government taking to providing free childcare to approximately a million families. 

 

Norway realized its gender gap in labour force participation in decline during the pandemic and it proffered double paid time off for women caring for small children, to 20 days.

According to Simeon Djankov, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, governments should see to financing a further expansion of childcare to ensure that working mothers not continue to be forced by circumstances during the struggle to contain COVID to abandon their jobs when home urgencies force them to remain at home. A situation which would have a further impact on deepening gender inequality and ultimately slow economic recovery.

With schools, summer camps and daycare facilities closed because of the pandemic, working parents like Toronto law clerk Charlotte Schwartz are juggling full-time work with round-the-clock child care. More often than not, women are doing a disproportionate amount of the child minding, and some who have been laid off are not returning to the workforce. (Andy Hincenbergs/CBC)