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In January, another 275,000 women dropped out of the workforce, nearly 80% of all workers over 20 who left the workforce last month, according to a National Women’s Law Center analysis of the latest report on the ’employment.
This brings the total number of women who have left the workforce since February 2020 to more than 2.3 million and the female participation rate to 57%, the lowest since 1988, according to the NWLC. By comparison, nearly 1.8 million men left the labor force during this same period.
Many of these women, says Emily Martin, NWLC vice president of education and workplace justice, have been forced out of the workplace due to continued closures of schools and daycares. These women, she explains, are not included in the calculated unemployment rate, which is already disproportionately high for women of color.
“To be considered unemployed, you have to look for work,” she told CNBC Make It. “Those who have left the workforce are no longer working or looking for work, so in some ways the unemployment rate is artificially lowered by not capturing 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 the NWLC shows that these job gains do not make up for the 5.3 million jobs that women have lost since the start of the pandemic and do not make up for the jobs lost by women in December 2020 only.
Initially, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 140,000 jobs lost in December, with women accounting for all of those losses. However, figures revised in the latest BLS report show 227,000 jobs were lost in December, with women accounting for 196,000 of those jobs, or 86.3 percent.
Following a decline in job growth in December, the addition of new jobs in January helped push the overall unemployment rate down from 6.7% to 6.3%. Women aged 20 and over faced an unemployment rate of 6% in January, matching the overall unemployment rate faced by men aged 20 and over. When broken down by race, white women saw an unemployment rate of 5.1% in January, while Asian women saw an unemployment rate of 7.9%, black women saw an unemployment rate of 8.5% and Latins saw an unemployment rate of 8.8%. The only group with higher unemployment rates than Latinas are black men, who in January had an unemployment rate of 9.4%.
“I think it is foolish not to recognize the fact that racism, whether conscious or unconscious, has an impact on some of these numbers,” Martin says, while adding that women, especially women of color, are over-represented in sectors such as retail, healthcare, recreation and hospitality, which have been hit hard by the pandemic. “And whether she is conscious or unconscious, [racism] sometimes influences decisions about dismissed people. “
In addition to women of color facing high unemployment rates, data from the NWLC shows that about 40% of women aged 20 and over were out of work for six months or more in January. Among women who worked last month, 17% of those over 16 were involuntarily working part time because they could not find a full time job. For women of color, that number was even higher with 27.9% Latinas, 24.4% black women and 18.5% Asian women forced into part-time work.
These long spells of unemployment, as well as the increase in the number of women dropping out of the workforce, “can really have an impact on wages when an individual finds a job. [full-time] work again ”says Martin, which is why she says increased financial assistance is essential to the economic security of working women today.
“These two things in particular really sound the alarm bells about the impacts of the Covid recession on the wages of women, especially women of color,” she adds, “and I am concerned about the impact this could have on the wages of women. have in years. “
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