Though women have made strides in gaining equality, the Coronavirus has set our progress back significantly. The pandemic hit the country and the economy so fast that mass layoffs were a necessary evil. During times of crisis some executives need to compile their lists quickly, and they generally look to position or tenure, aka “last hired, first fired.”

Women have been impacted by the pandemic differently from men in numerous ways. Many have had no choice but to leave the workforce to care for their families, while many others were laid off. Women tend to fill the most marginal, low-authority positions and have the shortest tenures, so they have lost their jobs at disproportionately high rates.

A National Women’s Law Center analysis stated that more than 2.3 million women have left the workforce since February 2020. This puts women’s participation rate in the labor force at 57%, the lowest it’s been since 1988. Nearly 1.8 million men have left the labor force in comparison. Emily Martin, the VP for education and workplace justice at NWLC, said that many of these women have been forced to leave the workforce “due to ongoing closures of schools and daycare centers.” She explained that these women are not calculated into the unemployment rate, which is already disproportionately high for women of color.

Martin explained to CNBC that many of the women who left work are not currently looking for work due to the responsibilities they have at home. “To be counted as unemployed, you have to be looking for work, women who have left the labor force are no longer working or looking for work so in some ways the unemployment rate is artificially lowered by the fact that it doesn’t capture these millions of women.”

According to the NWLC analysis, the unemployment rate for women over the age of 20 has increased twice as high since February 2020. Black and Latina women, in particular, continue to be impacted by the economic crisis: as of January 2021, more than 1 in 12 Black women ages 20 and over (8.5%), nearly 1 in 11 Latinas (8.8%), and more than 1 in 13 Asian women (7.9%) remained unemployed.

“January’s jobs data also indicates that many unemployed people have been out of work for most of the COVID-19 crisis. Among adult women ages 20 and over who were unemployed last month, 2 in 5 (40.3%) had been out of work for 6 months or longer.”

Women have suffered the majority of pandemic-related job losses as many of them were forced to resign to stay at home and take care of their children. The most recent report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics stated that all 140,000 net jobs lost in December were women's jobs. This is a direct result of policymakers’ refusal to fix systemic inequalities, modernize workplace standards, create a strong social safety net, or invest in caregiving.

The COVID-19 recession is unlike any other economic downturn we’ve experienced. Therefore it will require finding alternative solutions rather than traditional recovery responses. We need bold, structural policy changes that prioritize the economic security of women and their families to guarantee a broad and deep recovery. The future of the entire U.S. economy depends on these critical policy changes. If lawmakers want to create and pass effective policy changes for gender-equality recovery, they must pass immediate COVID-19 relief.

How can Lawmakers create urgent policy changes?

Creating a robust care infrastructure

Our current Care Infrastructure supporting Racial and Gender Equity during COVID-19 is disproportionately impacting women of color, who are losing more jobs while simultaneously being assigned greater responsibilities as underpaid “essential workers.” If we don’t invest in our Care infrastructure, women, “especially women of color who are primarily responsible for caring for their own families as well as others, will not be able to fully participate in the rebuilding of our economy. More women than men will face economic insecurity as a result of being unable to return to full-time work or having to cut their work hours.”

The lack of a care infrastructure in the United States pre-pandemic has severely impacted families across the country, as well the economic instability they are facing. Combine low, inequitable, and stagnant wages, the demands of managing an illness, and caring for a child or another family member can be extremely taxing emotionally, physically, and physically straining.

It is imperative that Universal Child Care Congress declares child care a public good and immediately passes legislation that guarantees all families can safely access affordable, high quality, and convenient child care in their own homes, as well as family care homes, or child care centers. They must also ensure equity and look to smart legislative solutions, such as the Child Care for Working Families Act and the Universal Child Care and Early Learning Act 2122.

Investing in universal child care will simultaneously enable higher workforce participation and provide a solid foundation for the subsequent educational success of children, ensuring their contributions as adults to the economy. Universal child care will also provide employment for the millions of women employed in retail and food service establishments whose jobs may never return, as well as support the entry into paid employment of women who want to work but cannot due to the high cost and/or unavailability of quality care for their children.

Photo credit: Kaspars Grinvalds/Shutterstck

Ensuring fair and equal wages and quality benefits

We need to end the prohibition against equal wages under the EPA which only applies only to jobs within an establishment. There are two types of establishments: 1. an individual place of business rather than an entire business or enterprise including multiple locations of business. 2. physically separate places of business may be treated as one establishment.

“For example, if a central administrative unit hires employees, sets their compensation, and assigns them to separate work locations, the separate work sites can be considered part of one establishment.”

In this case, "Equal" work does not mean identical jobs. Rather, they must be "substantially equal" in overall job content, regardless of position titles. For women to be considered substantially equal, the job duties must be "closely related" or "very much alike." Therefore, minor differences in the job duties or the skill, effort, or responsibility required for the jobs will not render the work unequal. An agency may have a defense if compensation is based on a seniority system, merit system, systems that measure earnings by quantity or quality of production, or any factor other than gender.

Creating strong workplace protections

Employers and workers in most workplace settings outside of healthcare must learn to identify the dangers of being exposed to and/or contracting COVID-19 at work and to help them implement proper control measures.

Face Masks, either cloth face coverings or surgical masks, are simple barriers that help protect yourself and others. Employers should also implement COVID-19 Prevention Programs in the workplace. The most successful programs encourage workers and their union or other representatives to get involved in the program's development and include the following key elements:

Conducting a hazard assessment
Identifying a combination of measures that limit the spread of COVID-19 in the workplace
Adopting measures to ensure that workers who are infected or potentially infected are separated and sent home from the workplace
Implementing protection from retaliation for workers who raise COVID-19 related concerns.

Without innovating solutions like these will further damage women’s progress and U.S. economic growth. Without congressional action, gender equity could set us back decades. This will hurt women, men, families, communities, employers, and the possibility of a healthy economic recovery. It’s time for Congress to act.

Women’s Unemployment Rate During the Pandemic

How can Lawmakers create urgent policy changes?