In January, another 275,000 women left the workforce, accounting for nearly 80 percent of all workers over the age of 20 who left the workforce last month, according to an analysis by the National Center for Women’s Rights. latest job report.
This puts the total number of women who have left the workforce since February 2020 in excess of 2.3 million, and places the participation rate of women in the workforce at 57%, the lowest that has been since 1988, according to NWLC. In comparison, almost 1.8 million men have left the workforce during this same period of time.
Many of these women, says Emily Martin, vice president of education and labor justice at NWLC, have been forced to leave their jobs due to the continuous 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 count as unemployed, you have to be looking for work,” he tells CNBC Make It. “Those who have left the workforce no longer work or look for work, so in a way, the unemployment rate is artificially reduced by not capturing these millions of women.”
In January, 49,000 net jobs were added to the economy, women got 87,000 jobs and men lost 38,000 jobs. Despite this positive growth for women, NWLC data show that these job gains do not offset the 5.3 million jobs that women have lost since the pandemic began and do not offset the jobs that women lost only in December 2020.
Initially, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 140,000 jobs lost in December, and women accounted for all of those losses. However, revised figures from the latest BLS report show that 227,000 jobs were lost in December, with women accounting for 196,000, or 86.3%.
Following the fall in employment growth in December, the incorporation of new jobs in January helped bring the overall unemployment rate down to 6.3% from 6.7%. Women aged 20 and over faced an unemployment rate of 6% in January, which is the same as the overall unemployment rate faced by men aged 20 and over. 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 had an unemployment rate of 8. 5% and Latinos had an unemployment rate of 8.8%. The only group with a higher unemployment rate than Latinos are black men, who in January had an unemployment rate of 9.4%.
“I think it’s silly not to acknowledge the fact that racism, whether conscious or subconscious, is affecting some of those numbers,” says Martin, adding that women, especially women of color, are overrepresented in industries such as care. and leisure and hospitality, which have been hard hit by the pandemic. “And be it conscious or subconscious, [racism] sometimes it influences decisions about who is fired. “
In addition to women of color facing high unemployment rates, NWLC data show that approximately 40% of women over the age of 20 had been unemployed for six months or more in January. Of the women who worked last month, 17% of people over the age of 16 worked involuntarily part-time because they could not find a full-time job. For women of color, this figure was even higher with 27.9% Latinos, 24.4% black women, and 18.5% Asian women forced to work part-time.
These long periods of unemployment, as well as the increase in women leaving the workforce, “can really affect wages when an individual finds [full-time] it works again, ”Martin says, which is why he says more financial relief is crucial to the economic security of today’s working women.
“These two things, in particular, really sound the alarms about the impacts of the Covid recession on the wages of women, specifically women of color,” she adds, “and I’m concerned about the impact it could have on here in years “.
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