WASHINGTON — So many women have dropped out of the workforce during the pandemic that the Biden administration has said it is an emergency and warned of a setback so severe that it could stand in the way of a full economic recovery.
The White House says it is concerned that women are taking themselves out of the running for promotions, off the frontlines of health care work and away from education opportunities that lead to higher paying jobs because their family responsibilities are piling up at home.
“In one year, the pandemic has put decades of the progress we’ve collectively made for women workers at risk,” Vice President Kamala Harris told women’s advocacy groups and female lawmakers recently. “And the longer we wait to act, the harder it will be to bring these millions of women back into the workforce,” she said.
Women workers are in crisis, experts agree. Layoffs in female-dominated industries and widespread school and daycare closures have had a crippling effect on economic opportunity and advancement for women.
More than 2.3 million women have left the workforce since the start of the pandemic compared with 1.8 million men, according to the National Women’s Law Center, which says the number of women who have jobs or are looking for work is at its lowest level since 1988.
“I think we all believe this is a national emergency. Women leaving the workforce in these numbers — it’s a national emergency and it demands a national solution,” Harris said.
The Biden administration says its COVID-19 relief package is a big part of the solution. Money in the bill to reopen schools for in-person learning and finance daycare is meant to help parents return to work.
Liberal advocacy groups say President Joe Biden’s stimulus plan is a good first step, but it will not be enough to help women get or stay in jobs. Provisions they say will help women significantly, such as a minimum wage increase, have been dropped from the COVID-19 relief legislation, while others, including permanent paid family and sick leave, were never in the package.
They anticipate that Biden will try to tackle some of the broader barriers to women’s financial success in his next big legislative proposal, an infrastructure package that could go beyond highways and broadband internet and include liberal priorities like high-quality and affordable child care.
“We have a crisis of a lack of a care infrastructure in the United States of America. That crisis existed before the pandemic began, and has now turned into an all out catastrophe,” said Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, co-founder of MomsRising. “Just like we need to build bridges in order to get to work, we need to build a child care infrastructure.”
Critics of the Biden administration say those policy proposals, which even liberals have disagreements on, could exacerbate the problems facing women who want to return to work. Conservatives have fought to prevent more government mandates on businesses and passage of Biden’s stimulus package.
“What is needed is open the schools, open the society, allow businesses to open, allow the free American people to resume their lives. That’s what we need,” said Carrie Lukas, president of the conservative Independent Women’s Forum. “We don’t need another just absolute boondoggle of a spending bill.”
JOBS LOST
In January, 275,000 women left the labor force. The month before,156,000 women lost their jobs. All of the jobs that went away in the United States in December were held by women, according to the National Women’s Law Center. Although they made some gains in January, the center said conditions are still dismal, especially for minority women.
Unemployment for Black women over age 20 in January was 8.5%, for Latinas it was 8.8%, for Asian American women it was 7.9%. White men of the same age faced an unemployment rate of 5.5%.
Women tend to work in hospitality, retail and caregiving jobs -- industries that have been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic -- and groups that study and advocate for women and families say that layoffs in those sectors have contributed sharply to the departure of women from the workforce over the past year.
The pandemic, they say, has put an additional burden on women to tend to aging or ill family members and children who would typically be at school or in daycare but are now at home. Half of the women in a February survey conducted by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research said that they had reduced their hours, left jobs or done both, since March 2020 because of caretaking responsibilities.
Biden’s stimulus plan included $15 billion for families struggling to afford child care and proposed emergency paid family, medical and sick leave of more than 14 weeks for all Americans that would expire at the end of September.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said that “Biden is interested in” making those policy proposals more permanent than what is in the relief plan.
Yellen said in a February interview with CBS’ “Face the Nation” that the president’s rescue plan is aimed at the immediate crisis. “But beyond that he looks forward to proposing ideas to address long-standing challenges that our economy has faced,” Yellen said.
Sen. Patty Murray, chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, told McClatchy this week that legislation that addresses pay equity, paid family leave and improves the nation’s child-care system will be critical to getting women back to work.
“This pandemic has really laid wide open some of the challenges that women face in our workforce. If we want our economy to work for everyone in this country, it needs to work for women, and we’re all focused on that,”said the Washington Democrat, who participated in the meeting that Harris held with women’s groups.
Women’s advocacy groups that are close to the White House said they share Murray’s sense of urgency on pursuing changes to federal law to help female workers.
They say that a minimum wage increase and measures to prevent wage discrimination would go a long way toward equity for women.
“The fact that we pay these substandard wages to people in these low-end service and caregiving jobs, which are mostly women, means that women have never got the opportunity to catch up,” said Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families.
Rachel Greszler, a research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said she also wants to see rising incomes for women and better access to benefits that traditionally come from employers. But she said the policies that liberal lawmakers and national groups are pushing for at the federal level could have unintended consequences.
Heritage said in a February report that a $15 federal minimum wage, which is what Biden supports, would increase child care costs by an average of 21 percent across the country. That would be an extra cost of $3,728 per year for two children, Greszler said in the report.
“Things like a minimum wage mandate or more government subsidies are not actually going to help,” she told McClatchy in an interview.
Conservatives are backing a bill introduced last month that would give private employers the option of allowing their employees who work extra hours to choose between overtime pay and paid time off.
Some experts worry that many of the low-wage jobs that have disappeared are not coming back. The government will need to help with retraining women, they say, and that should be a focus of Biden’s next big legislative proposal.
“There needs to be targeted job creation efforts in the sectors that have been hardest hit,” C. Nicole Mason, president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, said of future legislation. “And then also a second piece of that is the education and training and support for women who will not be able to return to their jobs, who may need to integrate into different sectors altogether.”
