What 2020 Revealed For Women (And How Recovery Can Happen)
By Kathy White, deputy director
A few weeks ago, on my 10,000th Zoom call of the last year, the facilitator opened with an icebreaker:
Describe the year 2020 with one word, and another one word for what you think it will be like in 2022.
At first, I balked, thinking, “Huh? The entirety of 2020 in a single word? The global pandemic, a catastrophic economic crash, the George Floyd racial justice protests, the steady COVID death toll, political turmoil, the personal struggles of friends and family, the individual worry and strain of trying to work at home and homeschool my kid at the same time – all that in a single word?” What word could be so rich as to capture all that?
After a little thought, I decided that the single word is revealed. The year 2020 revealed the fractures and fault lines—the deep inequities and vulnerabilities—in our culture and our economy. Every wave of global, national or individual shock, revealed the umbra, a truth we don’t want to acknowledge, a reality we don’t want to see that, nevertheless, persists at the center of our social lives.
The last shock came at the end of the year, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the monthly jobs report for December. The report showed the U.S. economy lost 140,000 jobs, all of which were jobs held by women.[1] All. Of. Them. It bears repeating: All of the jobs lost in the final month of 2020 were women’s jobs. Moreover, Black, Latina, and Asian women accounted for all the jobs lost by women in December.[2] That means every net job lost in the US in December was a job held by a woman of color.
Overall, the pandemic economy has not been kind to women, particularly women of color. Since March 2020, women have lost 5.4 million net jobs, nearly 1 million more than men. Service industries that tend to have higher concentrations of women workers, including women of color, were the hardest hit by the virus. Pre-pandemic, those jobs often paid less and offered fewer benefits—like health care or paid leave—that might have helped women better weather this particular crisis. Frankly, the pre-pandemic economy wasn’t particularly kind to women either, especially women of color and immigrant women who were more likely to work in these industries.
Moreover, droves of women left the workforce altogether in 2020. The National Women’s Law Center analysis found that over the year, nearly 2.1 million women exited the labor force, including 317,000 Latinas and 564,000 Black women. Why the mass exodus? In addition to a lack of safe and adequate employment opportunities, many women left the labor force due to the second (or third or fourth) unpaid job they have: caring for family.
In a recent survey by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 50.4 percent of women reported that since March 2020 they had stopped working or reduced their hours because of caretaking demands. As schools and daycares closed due to the pandemic, women hustled to take up the domestic labor of caring for children and family that they had previously outsourced to ‘other women,’ including teachers and workers in those low-paying service industry jobs.[3] Women of all races reported leaving work, reducing hours, or both at some point during the pandemic to meet increased caregiving demands.
Thus, the revelation. The U.S. economy doesn’t work without women’s work. Our economy is always propped up and only chugging along because of the domestic labor of women. Prosperity depends on the essential work of caring for aging parents and children, tending the sick, shopping, cooking, cleaning, bathing, calendaring, carpooling—all the work that theorist Silvia Federici told The New York Times is the “work we do that is sustaining – keeping ourselves and others around us well, fed, safe, clean, cared for, thriving.”[4] The work historically, and primarily still today, shouldered by women.
Unfortunately, it’s also exploited work. Despite being the cornerstone of economic prosperity, U.S. domestic labor goes unpaid or undervalued. One study found that U.S. women and girls lost $1.5 trillion in unpaid domestic labor in 2019 and that number was nearly $11 trillion worldwide. Domestic workers—child care providers, in home health care, cleaners—struggled to support themselves and their families on low wages and subpar (or nonexistent) benefits before the pandemic and suffered huge losses since it began. The devaluation of domestic labor and disregard for the essential work that sustains families and human beings is gendered oppression that has no place in our post-pandemic economy.
Recognizing the need to reorient our future economy to one that reimagines work of all kinds, especially domestic work, economists and policymakers have called for a number of changes. Federici calls for a process called “commoning,” whereby individual actors in the economy remove areas of life from commodification and monetization.[5] Sounds nice, but outside the realm of comprehensive policymaking.
Researchers at the Brooking Institution, Center for American Progress and Economic Policy Institute have called for valuing what has historically been devalued by increasing wages, enacting and enforcing stronger labor and anti-discrimination laws, establishing a robust care infrastructure, requiring better benefits such as health care and paid leave as well as fair scheduling, boosting unemployment insurance, and, importantly, extending all of these policies to include immigrant workers who do much of our sustaining labor.
Vice President Kamala Harris echoed these calls to action and added housing assistance and immediate direct relief payments to her recommendations for ways to address these inequities in a recent commentary in The Washington Post.[6] Direct relief payments are a bit like Federici’s notion of wages for housework; it’s providing a wage for what is now unpaid domestic labor. In the future, would a universal basic income, or something like it, serve as a more gender-neutral permanent valuing of the work that we know is necessary to sustain us all? The work must be done, but it need not be done solely by women. Solutions should encourage private and public valuation of the work, so that the talents of all – regardless of gender, gender identity and gender expression – find room to flourish in our economy. As Harris put it: “Our economy cannot fully recover unless women can fully participate.”
Which brings me around full circle to the single word that I hope that will describe 2022: Recovered. In its smallest sense, recovered means economic recovery, to recapture what has been lost: a return to pre-recession labor force participation, unemployment rates, stock market growth, and GDP. That’s not my meaning, though. I mean recovery in a more expansive, human sense—recovery as healing.
Mental health experts say there are four major dimensions that support human recovery and well-being: Health – making informed choices that support physical and emotional well-being; Home – having a stable and safe place to live; Purpose – focusing on meaningful daily activities and having the independence, income, and resources to participate in society; and finally, Community – relationships and social networks that provide support, friendship, love, and hope.[7] I read this and thought it’s exactly what our economy needs – treatment. To get at the root.
Policymakers should broaden their thought beyond traditional
economic metrics to considerations of health, home, purpose, and community – to
the needs of the human beings who are
the economy. Only then can what has been revealed by this terrible year be
healed and our economy truly recovered.
[1] Ewing-Nelson, Claire, All the Jobs Lost in December Were Women’s Jobs. National Women’s Law Center, January 2021. Accessed February 24, 2021. Available at: https://nwlc.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/December-Jobs-Day.pdf.
[2] Boesch, Diana and Shilpa Phadke, When Women Lose All the Jobs: Essential Actions for a Gender-Equitable Recovery. Center for American Progress, February 1, 2021. Accessed February 24, 2021. Available at: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2021/02/01/495209/women-lose-jobs-essential-actions-gender-equitable-recovery/.
[3] Kisner, Jordan, The Lockdown Showed How the Economy Exploits Women. She Already Knew. New York Times Magazine, February 17, 2021. Accessed February 24, 20201. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/17/magazine/waged-housework.html.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Harris, Kamala Vice President, Opinion: The Exodus of Women from the Workforce is a National Emergency. Washington Post, February 12, 2021. Available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kamala-harris-women-workforce-pandemic/2021/02/12/b8cd1cb6-6d6f-11eb-9f80-3d7646ce1bc0_story.html.
[7] https://www.samhsa.gov/find-help/recovery
