In January, another 275,000 women left the labor force, accounting for nearly 80% of all workers over the age of 20 who left the labor force last month, according to a national report for the National Women’s Center.
This brings the total number of women leaving the workforce since February 2020 to more than 2.3 million, and it puts the participation rate for women at 57%, according to NWLC, the lowest since 1988. By comparison, almost 1.8 million men leave the workforce during the same period.
Many of these women, says Emily Martin, VP of Education and Workplace Justice at NWLC, have been forced to leave the workplace due to the continued closure of schools and day care centers. These women, she explains, are not included in the calculated unemployment rate, which is already excessively high for women of color.
“To be counted as unemployed, you have to look for work,” she tells CNBC Make It. “Those who have left the labor force are no longer working or looking for work, and in some ways the unemployment rate is being artificially lowered by the fact that it is not catching these millions of women.”
In January, 49,000 net jobs were added to the economy, with women gaining 87,000 jobs and men losing 38,000 jobs. Despite this positive growth for women, data from NWLC shows that this job increase does not compare to the 5.3 million jobs that women have lost since the beginning of the pandemic, and it does not compensate for the work that women lost in December 2020 alone.
Initially, the Bureau of Labor Statistics lost 140,000 jobs in December, and women accounted for all the losses. However, revised figures in the latest BLS report show that 227 000 jobs were lost in December, while women make up 196 000 of the jobs, or 86.3%.
After a decline in employment growth in December, the addition of new jobs in January helped bring the overall unemployment rate down to 6.3% from 6.7%. Women, 20 years and older, had an unemployment rate of 6% in January, which is the same as the overall unemployment rate experienced by men 20 years and older. Divided by race, white women had an unemployment rate of 5.1% in January, while Asian women had an unemployment rate of 7.9%, black women an unemployment rate of 8.5% and Latinas a unemployment rate of 8.8%. The only group with a higher unemployment rate than Latinas are black men, who had an unemployment rate of 9.4% in January.
“I think it’s foolish not to acknowledge the fact that racism, whether consciously or subconsciously, affects some of these numbers,” Martin said, adding that women, especially women of color, are overrepresented in industries such as retail. children care and relaxation and hospitality, hard hit by the pandemic. “And whether it is conscious or subconscious, [racism] sometimes influences decisions about who it is that is fired. ‘
In addition to colored women experiencing high unemployment rates, NWLC data show that about 40% of women aged 20 and over were out of work for six months or more in January. Of the women who worked last month, 17% of those over 16 were involuntarily part-time because they could not get a full-time job. For colored women, this number was even higher with 27.9% Latinas, 24.4% Black women and 18.5% Asian women having to work part-time.
These long periods of unemployment, as well as the increase in women leaving the labor force, ‘can have an impact on wages as an individual’ [full-time] work again, ‘says Martin, that’s why she says more financial relief is crucial for the economic security of working women today.
“These two things in particular are really alarming about the effects of the Covid recession on the wages of women, specifically women of color,” she adds, “and I’m worried about the impact it could have for years to come.”
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