In January, another 275,000 women quit 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 in its latest report. jobs.
This brings the total number of women who left the workforce in February 2020 to over 2.3 million and raises the female labor force participation rate to 57%, the lowest since 1988, according to the NWLC. By comparison, almost 1.8 million men left the workforce in the same period.
Many of these women, says Emily Martin, vice president for education and justice at work at the NWLC, have been forced to leave their jobs due to the continued closure of schools and day centers. 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 a job,” she told CNBC Make It. “Those who have left the workforce are no longer working or looking for work, so in some respects the unemployment rate is artificially reduced by the fact that it does not attract 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 increase for women, NWLC data show that these job gains do not offset the 5.3 million jobs lost by women since the beginning of the pandemic and do not compensate for the jobs lost by women in December alone. 2020.
Initially, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 140,000 jobs lost in December, with women accounting for all of these losses. However, revised figures from the latest BLS report show that 227,000 jobs were lost in December, with women accounting for 196,000 of these jobs, or 86.3%.
Following a decline in job growth in December, the addition of new jobs in January helped reduce the overall unemployment rate to 6.3% from 6.7%. Women over the age of 20 experienced an unemployment rate of 6% in January, which is the same as the overall unemployment rate for men over the age of 20. By race, white women registered an unemployment rate of 5.1% in January, while Asian women recorded an unemployment rate of 7.9%, black women recorded an unemployment rate of 8.5. %, and the Latin ones registered an unemployment rate of 8.8%. The only group with a higher unemployment rate than Latin women are black men, who in January had an unemployment rate of 9.4%.
“I think it’s stupid not to acknowledge that racism, whether conscious or subconscious, affects some of these numbers,” says Martin, adding that women, especially women of color, are over-represented in industries such as retail, care and leisure and hospitality, which were severely affected by the pandemic. “And whether he is conscious or subconscious, [racism] sometimes it influences decisions about who is laid off. “
In addition to black women facing high unemployment rates, data from the NWLC show that about 40% of women over the age of 20 lost their jobs for six months or more in January. Of the women who worked last month, 17% of those over the age of 16 worked part-time involuntarily because they could not find full-time work. For women of color, this number was even higher, with 27.9% Latin women, 24.4% black women and 18.5% Asian women forced to work part-time.
These long periods of unemployment, as well as the increasing number of women leaving the workforce, “can really have an impact on wages when a person finds a job. [full-time] job again, “says Martin, which is why she says greater financial relief is crucial to the economic security of working women today.
“These two things, in particular, sound alarming about the impact of the Covid recession on the wages of women, especially women of color,” she adds, “and I’m worried about the impact it could have years ago.”
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