Employers struggling to fill open slots and recruit new workers often find themselves missing one crucial part of the workforce — women.
The American economy gained 467,000 jobs in January, but women got just 40.3% of those jobs. While it would take six months of growth at that level to gain back nearly all the 2.9 million jobs the economy lost since the pandemic began, it would take women nearly 10 months to recover the 1.8 million they lost in the same time. Overall, there are more than 1 million fewer women in the labor force in January 2022 compared to February 2020.
Yana Rodgers, professor with Rutgers-New Brunswick’s School of Management and Labor Relations and director of the Center for Women and Work, said while both men and women saw an increase in the amount of unpaid work during the pandemic, women performed more of that work.
“In 2020, women with school-age children definitely experiences a ‘Covid motherhood penalty,’ as evidenced by growing gender gaps in employment/population ratios and working hours. The recovery is not as inclusive as was predicted,” Rodgers said.
The gap between men and women is even more stark in some fields. In January, the leisure and hospitality field gained 151,000 jobs. Women gained just 34.4% of these jobs, despite accounting for 52.7% of that industry's workforce. About 17% of unemployed women have been out of the workforce over a year or longer. The toll the pandemic has taken on women is due to the way work itself was structured for decades, said Rebecca Ryan, an economist and founder of Next Generation Consulting Inc. That structure is a married man working for eight hours a day and then coming home to have the domestic work largely done already.
Overall, the employment rate for men in January was 3.2%, compared to 3.6% for women. But that number rises to 5.8% for black women and 7.9% for women with disabilities. Overall, the labor force participation rate — the percentage of adults who are employed — hovered around 62.2%. For men, it was 67.9%. For women, it was 56.8% — the lowest it has been since the late 1980s.
And more Americans are leaving their jobs than they have in the past as The Great Resignation continues, with the rate of Americans quitting their jobs in December dipping only slightly to 2.9% — just below the all-time record hit in both September and November 2021. That means 4.3 million Americans quit their jobs, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“The structure of corporate life is designed for a white man who is probably married and has someone at home taking care of the domestic responsibilities,” Ryan said. “ A lot of the infrastructure that we have is based around that model.”
What can employers struggling to find workers do? They could create programs that help women balance their lives and allow them to go back to work. That could be more flexible work or forming some kind of cooperative with other organizations to offer childcare, Ryan said.
A Metlife survey in late 2021 found that, while 48% of women said the pandemic had negatively impacted their careers, about 63% said they were ready to return. What did they want? For women interested in STEM fields, they wanted more diversity in the leadership pipeline, more flexibility in work arrangements and better benefits that suit their needs.
Many employers are responding to the demand for flexibility, with more than a quarter of all high-paying jobs in North America now offered in either a remote or hybrid environment, according to a review of 5 million career listings on Ladders, a career site focused on high-paying jobs.
But the current way work was structured has never been easy on women, Ryan said. The future may mean a lot more women decide to start their own businesses and forge their own career paths instead of diving back into the traditional workforce. And all the available data shows that entrepreneurship has surged.
“Covid precipitated the roof caving in on a structural problem that had been drip, drip, dripping for a long time now,” Ryan said. “My best guess in the near term is you are going to see some women going back in the traditional workforce. And more women, women of color applying for business licenses.”
But there is some hope in the near term, Rodgers said. The push around workplace flexibility — including remote work and flexible hours — and a shift toward men doing more of the household labor could help alter societal norms and make it easier for working mothers to balance the demands of a job with household work.
“Many signs point to the U.S. emerging from this pandemic with less distinct gender norms that may neutralize the stigma of the ‘mommy track,’ making retention and promotion in the workforce easier for women,” Rodgers said. “The current challenge for working mothers is to endure the disruptions caused by this pandemic so they may benefit from a more agile work environment in the future.”
