COVID-19 Job Market Wreaks Havoc on Black Women
By most measures, Black women have been hit hardest by job losses from the coronavirus pandemic.
By Tim Smart
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April 15, 2021, at 1:40 p.m.
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While many have noted the disproportionate effect that the pandemic has had on women in the workforce, there has been less focus on the harm it has done specifically to Black women.(LUIS ALVAREZ/GETTY IMAGES)
When the economy added 916,000 jobs in March and the unemployment rate fell to 6%, there was reason to be optimistic about the trajectory of the labor market entering the second year of COVID-19.
There had been a steady decline in the unemployment rate for white workers, from 6% in December to 5.4% in March, with the rate for white males falling from 5.8% to 5.2% and the rate for white women dropping from 5.7% to 5%.
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Black men also saw their rate drop, from 9.9% to 9.6%. Black women, though, experienced an increase in their rate to 8.7% from 8.4% in December.
While many have noted the disproportionate effect that the pandemic has had on women in the workforce, there has been less focus on the harm it has done specifically to Black women. In February 2020, right before the coronavirus was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, Black women had an employment to population ratio of 60.8%; that now stands at 54.8%, a drop of 6 percentage points. White women have seen their rate over the same time period fall by 2.9 percentage points while the rate for white males has fallen by 3.8 percentage points.
"The 6 percentage point drop is the largest among all groups," says Erica Groshen, senior economics advisor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and a former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
There are several reasons for this, including some specific to the recession that followed a near-national business lockdown in March. These include the recession taking a firm grip on such economic sectors as tourism, retail, dining out and other personal services which tend to employ large numbers of women, and especially Black women.
State and local governments, which also employ large numbers of Black women in good-paying jobs, saw outsized job losses. State and local governments employed more than a million fewer workers in February of this year compared with February 2020. Nearly one in four public sector workers are Black women.
"Among demographic groups, Black women experienced the steepest drop in labor force participation and have had the slowest job recovery since January 2020," Janelle Jones, the Labor Department's chief economist, wrote in a blog post in February. "It took until 2018 for Black women's employment to recover from the Great Recession, and now almost all of those hard-won gains have been erased."
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It remains to be seen how the 2020 recession will play out compared to the 2007 to 2009 downturn, which originated in the financial sector. The recession last year was of historic proportion but also very short.
Still, the underlying racial disparities that exist in employment cannot be ignored. "In fact, at every education level, Black workers have higher unemployment rates compared to their white counterparts," Jhacova Williams, an associate economist at the Rand Corporation, wrote in September. "For example, Black workers with college degrees have unemployment rates similar to that of white workers with high school diplomas."
There are also long-standing problems that Black women face, including difficulty finding childcare, as well as shorter life expectancies and higher rates of maternal mortality. Black women are disproportionately burdened by chronic health conditions, such as anemia, cardiovascular disease, and obesity.
Taken together, the coronavirus proved to be a double whammy for Black women, robbing them of their jobs as well as threatening their health.
While there is optimism that jobs are starting to come back, it is also possible that some industries may not return to the same levels of employment.
"Women saw real losses in retail and leisure and hospitality," says Jasmine Tucker, director of research at The National Women's Law Center. "These businesses that have shuttered are not coming back. Those are permanent losses."
Tucker notes that 552,000 Black women have left the labor force in the past year. If they were back in the labor force, actively seeking work but unemployed, the unemployment rate for Black women in March would have been 13.4% instead of the official 8.7%.
Although it did not specifically address race, a recent survey conducted by Commercial Cafe, an online commercial real estate listing site, found that 73% of mothers who were unemployed cited the need to assume childcare duties as the reason for their current predicament.
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An analysis by the McKinsey Global Institute last July found that women's jobs were 1.8 times more vulnerable to the COVID-19 crisis than men's jobs. In the U.S., McKinsey estimated that women made up 46% of the workforce before the coronavirus pandemic and, allowing for industry mix, they should have made up 43% of job losses. In fact, they made up 54% of the jobs lost in the first four months of the pandemic.
To address some of the structural issues facing women in the workplace, President Joe Biden's recently passed American Rescue Plan included significant expansions of the Child Care and Earned Income Tax Credits.
"The American Rescue Plan's expansions will help many hard hit by the current crisis," the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted upon the law's passage. "Many in essential jobs have faced a higher risk of infection and death due to their jobs, while many others lost their jobs or saw their incomes fall due to pandemic-related closures or reduced hours."
The center pointed out that "jobs in low-paying industries were down more than twice as much between February 2020 and February 2021 as jobs in medium-wage industries and more than three times as much as in high-wage industries."
"Due to employment discrimination and unequal opportunity in education and housing, among other factors, gaps in unemployment between Black and Latino workers on one hand and white workers on the other widen quickly in recessions and narrow much more slowly after an economic recovery begins," it added.
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