The pandemic drove women out of the workforce. Will they come back? - POLITICO

Sandee Barrick was making a six-figure salary as a salesperson when she quit her job in December 2019 to move to North Carolina. She had planned to return to work as soon as she got settled, but she was still enrolling her younger son in school and switching over her driver’s license and registration when the coronavirus pandemic hit and everything shut down. At first she made plans for when she went back to work, but slowly that shifted to if she would go.

So far, at least, she hasn’t. Barrick, a 51-year-old mother of two, worries sometimes about her 401(k) and the money she could have been adding to it over the past 18 months had she been working. She worries too about her elder son’s college tuition and what she would do if the cost increased or financial aid decreased.

But mostly she values the extra time at home, the holidays she no longer has to work through and the fact that she no longer feels she’s racing through her life on auto-pilot, tied up not just with “the job and the kids but the scheduling of doctor’s appointments, and the cooking and the cleaning.” She and her husband have decided they can make it work on one income, and the setup also feels, at least for now, like it’s best for their family.

“The longer I’m out of it, the more I’m just kind of like, well, should I go back?” Barrick said. “The longer time goes by, the more ambivalent I get.”

Barrick is far from alone. Nearly 1.8 million women have dropped out of the labor force amid the pandemic and are now grappling with whether and how to return to work in a vastly different landscape — one where some jobs have disappeared, others are vulnerable to automation, and nearly all involve some level of health risk.

Returning to work after so many months at home also means, for many mothers, finding a new form of child care and giving up the additional time spent with families and kids that the pandemic provided. Taking into account how the labor force was growing pre-pandemic, 2.3 million fewer women are working now than would have been without the disruption.

Overall, 57.5 percent of women aged 20 and older were participating in the U.S. labor force in June — down from 59.2 percent in February 2020 and a level that, even after months of improvement, is still the lowest in more than 30 years. Economists caution that women’s workforce participation in the U.S. has been stagnant for decades, more or less plateauing around 2000 — a phenomenon experts say shows that even before the pandemic, working women needed more societal supports than were available. But the pandemic still dealt a resounding blow.

The pandemic hit women harder than men

Month-to-month change in civilian labor force, in women and men 20 years and older

The question now, which holds major implications for the economy, is how many of those women will come back.

There’s cause for concern. So far, low-income women and women of color are lagging far behind other groups in how fast they are returning to work and recovering financially. Mothers across the income spectrum have been forced to take on additional child care responsibilities as schools and day cares have closed. And some higher-income women are moving to lower cost of living areas — allowing two-parent families to justify going down to one income — or opting to pause or downshift their careers. Barrick and her husband downsized significantly in their move from Ohio to North Carolina, and the lower mortgage payment is part of the reason she’s been able to stay home.

Data showing so many women on the sidelines has amped up pressure on Congress and the Biden administration to funnel new federal investments into the child care industry and to enact benefits, including paid family leave. Employers, too, are fielding calls to allow for more flexible hours and more remote work — two changes that experts expect would particularly benefit women.

Economists are warning that failing to get women back to work would have detrimental effects on the broader economy: Every 10 percent increase in women working is associated with a 5 percent increase in wages for all workers as overall labor force productivity increases, one University of Akron economist found. And equalizing employment across gender would have added almost $500 billion to U.S. GDP in 2019, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco concluded in a report earlier this year. Women make up about 47 percent of the U.S. workforce, but 51 percent of the overall population.

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The pandemic drove women out of the workforce. Will they come back? - POLITICO
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