Consider This from NPR - The Economy Is Driving Women Out Of The Workforce And Some May Not Return

Episode Date: October 19, 2020

Women are dropping out of the workforce in much higher numbers than men. Valerie Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute explains that women are overrepresented in jobs that have been hit hardest by the pandemic and child care has gotten harder to come by. The situation is especially dire for Latina women, as NPR's Brianna Scott reports. Last month, out of 865,000 women who left the workforce, more than 300,000 were Latina. Victoria de Francesco Soto of The University of Texas at Austin explains why it's not just the pandemic economy hurting women. Some may be left out of the recovery, too. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Layoffs, food stamps, a hurricane. This is not what Jennifer Staley had planned for 2020. I'll be fine. It's fine. Everything's fine. Nothing's fine. Staley lives in southern Alabama. She works as a waiter at a restaurant in Gulf Shores right on the beach. Well, she used to work there anyway. I usually would make anywhere between, oh, like five and eight or nine hundred dollars a week.

It was enough to cover her expenses, rent, food, not just for her, but also for her two kids, a 15-year-old and her two-year-old son. It was tight, but it worked. Then came COVID. Staley became one of the more than 11 million American women who lost their jobs in the start of this pandemic. Her restaurant reopened for a bit, then Hurricane Sally shut it down in September. Now she's back to looking for work. Work in a service industry that is still devastated. Affordable child care is hard to come by, and the stalemate in Washington means there is no guarantee of any extra stimulus coming her way.

Jennifer Staley is stuck. I really hate asking for help, but I don't have any food and I don't have any pull-ups for him and I don't, I just don't have anything. And one of my managers from work went to Piggly Wiggly and got me groceries. And I ran around after the hurricane came through and picked up MREs and I'm going to hoard them for the next time I might not have money. So I've gotten help, but I've had to really, I've had to beg for help and it sucks. Consider this. More women than men

lost their jobs in this pandemic-era economy. Millions more. What if the recovery ends up unequal too? From NPR, I'm Adi Cornish. It's Monday, October 19th.

Voting is crucial. And I don't give a damn how you look at it. Thank you. a new series about voting in America from NPR's ThruLine. Listen now. It's Consider This from NPR. It's been six months now since the unemployment rate peaked back in April. People are starting to get back to work. Some jobs are coming back. Valerie Wilson is an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. She's starting to see some trends. As we have continued on, it has become clearer and clearer that the recovery from this recession will not be nearly as uniform. In the federal jobs report for September,

there was one stat that caught Wilson's eye, the number of people who left the labor force. So the way that we measure unemployment in this country, the unemployment rate only considers people who report that they have actively searched for a job in the last four weeks. That means if you're not actively searching for a job, you may still be unemployed, but you're not counted that way in government statistics. And a disproportionate number of those people are women. In September alone, more than a million Americans stopped looking for work. 80% of them were women. Women, especially women of color, are overrepresented in jobs that have been hit hardest by COVID. Servers, housekeepers, retail workers, that kind of thing.

And Wilson says childcare has gotten harder. A lot of schools and childcare centers are still closed. So many women are faced with a set of choices that are all bad. Do you go to work and expose yourself to the virus, but continue to bring in income? Do you not go to work, have more protection from the virus,

but not have the income? For women in go to work, you know, have more protection from the virus, but not have the income? For women in particular, who are single heads of households with minor children in school, they're having to make choices about child care at the same time as they're having to make decisions concerning the economic security of their households, as well as the health of their households. There was another striking part about that huge number of women who left the workforce last month. Of the 865,000, more than 300,000 of them were Latina. So whereas white women may have been more likely to retain employment because they had

jobs that they could do from home, Latino women were employed in jobs that they were not able to do remotely. That's Valerie Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute. In Piers, Brianna Scott spent the week speaking to Latinas around the country, asking about how they're making it work. Or not. It definitely wasn't a choice for Celeste Selwyn to step away from work earlier this year. Selwyn's 51. She lives in Santa Rosa, California. She's worked as a social worker for eight years, working with kids and young adults. At the start of the

pandemic, Selwyn tried to keep working full-time with all 85 of her usual clients, but her son's school closed and she had to take over watching him and teaching him. She's a single mother, her son is 12 years old, and he has autism, so he needs a lot of extra help. He was having severe behaviors like leaving the house, he was flooding the bathroom, broke the sink. It's not that he means to do it. Selwyn's son needs constant supervision and help with things like going to the bathroom and normally he'd be in school all day getting help with speech therapy and reading and keeping himself calm but for Selwyn having to do all that alone was overwhelming.

It was really hard and I was really at my breaking point in March, where I didn't think that I could continue going on, trying to care for him and having like all these emails and phone calls from work. I couldn't even shower. So she tried working part-time for a while, but without the medical benefits that come with working full-time hours, Selwyn would have had to pay a couple hundred bucks for her son's medication every month. So she went back to working full-time in July. She packs it all into her mornings now when her son is at his calmest instead of later in the day. As long as my child doesn't go hungry and my bills are paid, that we keep the lights on. I mean, it's a struggle, but, you know, as women of color, we make things work. The other primary factor in why so many Latinas have lost their

jobs or dropped out of the labor force is what's called occupational segregation. In other words, how Latinas are overrepresented in industries like restaurant service, hotels, and housekeeping. By April, 72% of domestic workers report they were out of work, according to a study done by the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Many of them are still without a steady job, like Rosana Arrujo. She's 52 years old and originally from Uruguay. She came to the U.S. about 20 years ago, illegally, and now she lives in Miami, where she cleans houses and warehouses. She says at the beginning of the pandemic, she lost most of her cleaning jobs. Now, when she can find work, she says she can bring in about $1,500 a month.

But her rent is $1,000. So she's left with just a few hundred bucks most months for everything else. When she's not able to find work, she's had to get help from her 19-year-old son or from a charity fund. She says she's worried about catching COVID because she's had pneumonia before, and the cleaning products she uses sometimes make it harder for her to breathe. It's a bind. Her job might get her sick, but she doesn't have health care, so she'd need that income from work to pay for any medical bills.

She's scared, but she says you just have to keep going. Arujo says that when immigrants face a pandemic, those without documents suffer the most, especially the domestic workers. While other women could be helped by a second round of stimulus checks, Arujo isn't eligible to receive one. For now, she says, she's just trying to work as much as she can and save money and prepare like she would for a hurricane.

NPR's Brianna Scott. Victoria Day Francesco Soto hears stories like all of these, and she worries big time. She's a public policy expert at the University of Texas. And she tells me that without any help or change, the hardships facing women, like the three we've heard about, may not stop with having to go part-time. We're probably also going to see a lot of women, you know, spiraling down, and it pains me to say this, you know, having to move in with relatives. Probably this is going to be a cause of potential homelessness among women. So I think that if we don't

see something happen in terms of a real solution, we're gonna see real pain and suffering. In your view, what's needed to right this ship? I mean, is it about another stimulus package? A stimulus package is important, but we're talking about structural change here. The United States, comparatively speaking, it's really embarrassing what our child care system looks like. We have this patchwork system where you have Head Start, which is amazing, but Head Start only serves about 7% to 13% of those families who need it. We have the tax credits that help higher income families, but that only covers about a quarter of the childcare costs. So we need to reimagine what a childcare system in an industrialized nation like the United States

looks like. Most other of our peer countries have universal pre-K-4, universal pre-K-3, a lot more supports in terms of childcare. We need to step it up. What might the lasting impact be, especially on those communities that were hit the hardest, right, had the largest numbers of job loss? Right. So if we don't see structural change, not just sending out a check, a check is good to tide one over, but more meaningful structural change, we're going to see the inequalities that we are presencing right now only widen and at the same time set women further back. We have seen women slowly but surely make gains in terms of closing the pay gap. It's still a yawning divide, but we are closing it as we're increasing our education, as we're getting more into the STEM fields,

but without the structural supports of child care and also targeted female workforce training. Because the other piece of this is that we know that women are overrepresented in the jobs that are low wage, low skilled, that are the most easily automated. So if we're not retooling our women and getting our young girls in school ready to engage in the fourth industrial revolution, women are a danger of falling behind. Victoria DeFrancesco Soto of the University of Texas. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Audie Cornish.