16 FORTUNE FEBRUARY/MARCH 2021In early 2020, just before the first U.S.
patient was diagnosed with COVID-19,women crossed a major employment milestone.
The labor market was booming. Health care,education, and other service sectors largely
staffed by female workers were racing to hiremore people. And for a few shining months in
early 2020, government data showed that womenoutnumbered men in the U.S. paid workforce.Then “the whole house burned
down,” says Michael Madowitz, a
labor economist at the Center for
American Progress.
It’s been almost a year since
COVID-19 closed the schools and
day cares working mothers rely on
for childcare, and battered many of
the service-oriented businesses with
majority female workforces. And in
that time, the pandemic has set work-
ing women back by more than three
decades—to levels of labor force par-
ticipation last seen in 1988. The re-
sulting employment conflagration has
spread across race, age, and industry,
from low-paid essential workers to
“knowledge” employees in remote-
friendly corporate roles—although
it has, predictably and awfully, donethe most damage to the
Black and Latina women
who were already the most
economically vulnerable.
“We’ve lost so much
ground. It’s astronomi-
cal,” says C. Nicole Mason,
president and CEO of
the Institute for Women’s
Policy Research.
The numbers are shock-
ing: 5.4 million women’s
jobs gone since last Febru-
ary—55% of all net U.S.
job losses in that time
period. Almost 2.1 million
women vanished from the
paid labor force entirely.
By September, three work-
ing mothers were unem-
ployed for every father
who had lost his job.
Then, early this year
came perhaps the bleakest
statistic yet: In December,
the U.S. economy shed
a net 140,000 jobs, the
first such downturn since
April. Jobs lost by women
account for the entirety
of that number. While
individual men became
unemployed during that
period, men as a group
gained 16,000 jobs for the
month. But women as a
group—especially women
of color—lost 156,000.
The damage to women’semployment is likely
to endure beyond the
pandemic’s eventual end.
Women who have lost
jobs or left the labor force
are missing out on future
retirement and Social
Security income as well as
current wages and savings.
Ultimately, some econo-
mists predict, the crisis
will increase the gender
wage gap by five percent-
age points. And women
who try to return to the
labor force in the future
will do so with a yawning
hole in their résumés.
“Whether women
regain their footing in the
post-pandemic economy
depends on whether
employers recognize the
reason for those gaps or
penalize women for a
reality they had no control
over,” says philanthropist
Melinda Gates, whose
Pivotal Ventures fund
focuses on gender equity.“THERE HAVE definitely
been days where I’m like,
‘Maybe I should give up,’ ”
says Julia Pollak, labor
economist for online job
marketplace ZipRecruiter
and a mother of two
young children. Their
schools have been remote
since March, so Pollak is
scheduling her paid work
around the kids’ Zoom
calendars. But at least her
job’s flexibility allows her
to “make up for lost time
during the day” by work-
ing 8 p.m. to midnight,
when the kids are in bed.
“It’s lower-wage women,
who have to leave the
house to go to a grocery
store or a warehouse, who
DECEMBER 2019 DECEMBER 2020 have no choice but to leaveCHANGE IN LABOR PARTICIPATION RATE
–5%01%SOURCE: BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS (SEASONALLY ADJUSTED DATA)APRIL 2020–2.5%–3.4%MENWOMEN