Women in the Workplace
Did you know there is an Equal Pay Day? In 2021, the 24th of March indicates how much further into the following year a woman has to work to earn the equal pay of her male peer from the year before. Because on average, women take home 82 cents to every dollar that a man does. (63 cents for Black women, 60 cents for Native women, and 55 cents for Hispanic.) And this is not comparing construction work to waiting tables; this an apples-to-apples comparison, revealing blatant biases.
Let’s break this out a little more. You ready for some statistics?
Overall, females have lost 5.4 million jobs during this pandemic...which is 1 million more than men.
Not that the pandemic is the source of all the disparity...2018 statistics showed 21.4 million women living in poverty, with more than ⅔ Black and 41.4% Hispanic Mothers as the primary breadwinners for their families.
2019 stats had the median income of working women at 82% of men; 17.3 million of them were only working part-time--nearly double the rate of men--as 84% were unable to work more hours due to familial responsibilities. For women of color, these percentages climb even higher.
By 2020, only 21% of workers had access to paid family and medical leave, which, together with no affordable childcare, brought a year-over-year cost of $28.9 billion in wage loss prior to the pandemic.
By the time lockdowns began, an overwhelming loss of customer-facing and service-centered jobs hit women first and hardest. Entertainment, restaurants, and hospitality had a 53% loss for women, accounting for 2 of every 5 jobs lost in the pandemic.
School and childcare closures, along with nonessential medical procedures, took another toll where 77% of the jobs are held by women, representing 13% of total job loss during the pandemic.
Governmental employees caught in cut-backs were 58% women, and in September alone, 863,000 women (nearly 4 times the rate of men) dropped out of the labor force because of no childcare funding and other familial duties such as high-risk parents needing caretaking, that by December of 2020, they were still down 2.1 million jobs in the workforce.
For women of color, these percentages show an even wider range of disparity. According to The Center for American Progress, Latinas were hit by some of the worst outcomes of the pandemic recession, with 20.1% unemployment in December 2020. In September, 337,000 Hispanic women left the workforce entirely, from lack of work to caregiving necessities. The peak of pandemic unemployment for Black women was last May at 16.6%, yet by December, 154,000 of them had left the workforce also due to lack of employment possibilities and overwhelming caregiving demands. Meanwhile, usually a demographic with one of the lowest unemployment rates at around 3%, Asian women peaked at 16.4% unemployment in May.
What does all this mean? The reduction in women’s work hours will result in an estimated loss of $64.5 billion in wages and economic activity year-over-year...which is a $35.6 billion increase from the pre-pandemic annual cost.
We are talking about an inequity breeding ground of epic proportion. Not only requiring women to deal with the pre-pandemic disparity of pay, job role, title, company investiture, bonus programs, retirement security, glass-ceiling restrictions, but also gender-role limitations and cost requirements from Pink and Tampon Tax, pregnancy and maternity leave (60% of which is unpaid in the U.S.), and having to restart their careers multiple times within their workforce lifecycle due to being the most designated family member to give up a career or job role to care for children, a spouse, parent, or extended family member.
Because “It’s just what women do.”
For too long, at too high a cost.
As a closing tribute to Women’s History Month, we say: we see you, we feel you, we know you, and we are allies in moving forward to break down these systemic inequities in the workforce.
Take your brilliant light and put it to good use, ladies. We’re right beside you.