Expert discusses why women are leaving the workforce after the pandemic

WASHINGTON (7News) — The latest jobs report shows more than 500,000 new jobs were added in the last month alone, but research shows the COVID-19 pandemic has slowed the return of women to the workplace.

Hundreds of thousands of women have decided not to return to work since the pandemic, in part because of issues finding reliable child care.

SEE ALSO | 'Burned out'? Why won't more women return to the job market?

7News spoke with Debra Lancaster, executive director at the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University on the recent trend.

Anna-Lysa Gayle: What are some of the challenges women are facing right now with the workforce?

Debra Lancaster: Well as you know, women's work lives and everyone's work lives, but women, in particular, have been disrupted in profound ways and I do want to point out that many women have been working in the frontlines in jobs designated as essential from the beginning of the pandemic but they're also doing even more unpaid care work at home and many women in households are continuing to confront economic hardships as a result of the pandemic and I think it's really highlighted the precariousness of some of their progress that women have made in the workforce and the persistent of some of the structural qualities in our economy as well as what happens when we don't have a robust childcare system to support families

Anna-Lysa Gayle: Do you believe this trend will change, now that kids are getting vaccinated?

Debra Lancaster: I do think women will return to the workforce. Women want to work. before the pandemic, in January 2020, the headlines read that women were breaking records for their labor market participation rates, they were participating in the workforce at levels that we've rarely seen, and that all came crashing down as necessary public health measures were put in place. And remember that women occupy a disproportionate amount of the jobs in the industries hardest hit, particularly in those early days. So if we think about retail, hospitality, healthcare, childcare, social services - many of those jobs kind of stopped as industries took a pause. And if we think about childcare actually, in particular, that's an example of an industry where there's mostly female and was greatly impacted by the pandemic, again in those early days. It's also a really low-wage occupation and certainly in some states, if not across the country, have had a hard time recovering those jobs. Future compounding difficulties with women returning to work, if they don't have reliable quality childcare that they can afford, it makes it difficult to return to the workforce - so I think really taking a look at the childcare industry which we really need to be functioning well and thinking how we might invest in that will help insulate us against, hopefully not the next pandemic, but whatever the next big step is.

Anna-Lysa Gayle: If this trend continues, how will it impact the job market?

Debra Lancaster: Well, it's not good when women feel they don't have the choice to participate in a paid labor market, one that contributes to the wage gaps that we see across all women. and those get worse as we look at Black and Latino women. And if it takes money out of the economy, households have less money to put into the economy and women have less ability to try to build wealth for themselves and their families. And by the way, employers need women to work.