Lorinda Roslund, a 37-year-old single mother of two in Madras, Oregon, has been preparing for an emergency. After a medical crisis took her out of work for a few months in 2013, she spent the next seven years building a strong savings cushion. She opened a massage and facial business in 2016, and even though demand for appointments was consistently strong, she also took on a second job working as a masseuse at a nearby ranch once a week.
“I had two jobs because I figured if something happened with one of them, I’d have another one to fall back on,” Roslund told Forbes. “I was not prepared for a pandemic.”
Stay-at-home orders shuttered both businesses in March, and while Oregon laws would allow Roslund to reopen her massage studio (the ranch is still closed, she says), childcare issues have kept her out of the workforce. Her prepandemic solution, which was to have her parents watch her sons, is no longer an option; They’re in their 70s, and until they can receive a vaccine are at high risk of contracting Covid-19. Roslund’s friends, meanwhile, all work during the day.
“They say it takes a village to raise a child, and, you know, the village kind of evaporated when the pandemic came along,” she says.
Roslund’s reality will sound familiar to many of the 2 million women who’ve left the labor force since the pandemic took hold of America nearly one year ago—or to anyone who has talked to a mother, single or otherwise, at any point over the last 11 months. The demands of remote work and Zoom school have disproportionately fallen on women, pushing many out of the workforce entirely. And according to the jobs data reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Friday, this trend is not showing signs of reversing soon.
The January jobs report didn’t look all that bad at first glance: The American economy added 49,000 non-farm jobs in January, and the unemployment rate for women overall ticked down to 6.0% from December’s 6.3%. Of course, that figure does not account for the disproportionate effect the pandemic has had on Black and Brown women, and the granular data shows a fuller picture: The January unemployment rate for Black women was 8.5%, and 8.8% for Latinas. And 11.3% of women who have a disability are unemployed, up from 7.3% one year ago.
Women’s unemployment rates, across race, as of January 2021, were all higher than the 5.5% unemployment rate for white men, according to BLS data.
NATIONAL WOMEN’S LAW CENTER
That the top-line unemployment rate ticked down between December and January is more a function of people leaving the workforce than it is a sudden reemergence of jobs, economists say. A National Women’s Law Center analysis of the jobs data found that 275,000 women left the labor market in January alone, bringing the total number of women who’ve left the workforce since the beginning of the pandemic to 2.3 million and the female labor force participation rate (meaning the percent of American women who are either working or looking for work) to 55.7%.
“Before the pandemic, women’s labor force participation rate had not been this low since 1988,” writes NWLC analyst Claire Ewing-Nelson.
Roslund’s own experience reflects this data. “I’ve been out of work since mid-March,” she says. “And that’s basically the longest time since I started working at 15 that I’ve been out of a job.”
There continues to be a tale of two pandemics in the U.S. labor market: As the leisure and hospitality industry shed another 61,000 jobs (after losing more than 500,000 in December) and retail trade lost 38,000, employment in professional and business services rose by 97,000 jobs, while management consulting and computer systems-related services added 16,000 and 11,000 jobs, respectively.
“I think one of the really horrible things about all this it is exacerbating a real, unhealthy aspect of where the economy is, which is this bifurcation between rich and poor,” says Lucinda Duncalfe, the founder and CEO of executive search platform AboveBoard. Because her service focuses on increasing female representation at the highest levels of business, Duncalfe has seen the pandemic’s disproportionate effect on female careers by dint of women telling her that they’re not looking for a promotion or a new role while they’re also monitoring remote school for their kids or serving as a caregiver for older family members. But she also recognizes that her clients are not mom-and-pop nail salons, restaurants or clothing boutiques. They’re running businesses in technology, management and other professional services.
“The reality is companies in my world are growing like crazy,” Duncalfe says. “But guess what: you need a M.S. in computer science.”
You also need a flexible boss. Emile Nelson is a single mother of a 6-year-old daughter who was working as a legal secretary at a small law firm in southeast Portland, Oregon. In the earliest days of the pandemic, when her daughter’s day care was open with limited hours and capacity, Nelson was able to work part-time. But then, the day care closed completely, and Nelson says her boss would not let her work remotely or bring her daughter to the office. And so, she had no choice but to leave her job.
“People talk about the hardship on families, but nobody talks about single parents, or single moms who have kind of always been less valued,” she says.
Nelson applied for pandemic unemployment assistance (the program that, under the 2020 CARES Act, provided $600 per week to people already collecting unemployment compensation), but it took until August for benefits to start coming through. The $1,400 direct check that’s a piece of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package would be a welcome cash infusion for Nelson, but until the package gets passed through a budget reconciliation or bipartisan agreement, that money is only theoretical for her and the millions of Americans who are in similar positions.
In the meantime, Nelson has depended on forbearance from lenders and has started an Etsy candle business to help pay for gas and groceries. But none of this has helped replace full-time employment.
“I’m surviving,” she says, “on luck.”
Editor’s note: this story was updated to reflect that women’s labor force participation rate in January was 55.7%.
Source Article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2021/02/08/im-surviving-on-luck-an-inside-look-at-the-womens-labor-crisis/?sh=7b8b9a0c4eb3