American Women Lost More Than 5 Million Jobs In 2020

Following the final jobs report of 2020, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics released on Friday, a National Women’s Law Center analysis of the numbers provided a horrifyingly fitting coda to a horrifying year: Not only did the U.S. workforce lose 140,000 jobs in December, but women lost a net 156,000 jobs, while men gained a net 16,000. In other words, women accounted for 100% of the labor market’s first month of losses since a tepid recovery began in May.

Held at face value, the December numbers appear to be a stunning fall from where women’s employment was one year ago, when BLS data showed that women held more jobs than men by a slim margin. And there’s no question that women are hurting: If you compare the number of nonfarm payroll positions held by women at the start of 2020 to those held by women at the end of the year, American women lost more than 5 million jobs in the course of 12 months. But neither this fact nor the 156,000 jobs lost in December tells the full, complicated story of how women are faring in the U.S. labor market.

“That women were over 100% of the [December] losses is a stark top line, but one thing we’ve been keeping an eye on is the data on long-term unemployment, and we’re seeing among women who are unemployed, almost 40% have been out of work for six months or longer,” Claire Ewing-Nelson, author of the NWLC analysis, tells Forbes. “It’s not just that women are losing jobs, it’s that they lost them months ago and haven’t been able to find more work.”

By Ewing-Nelson’s accounting, 2.1 million women left the labor market entirely since the beginning of the pandemic, meaning they’re not even looking for work.

The unemployment rate for women overall is 6.3%, according to the December jobs report. But this headline figure, too, elides a harsher reality for women of color: 8.4% of Black women are unemployed, and the figure rises to 9.1% for Latinas. This is because the sectors that lost the most jobs (in December and 2020 as a whole) are those with disproportionate rates of Black, Latinx and Indigenous workers, including restaurants, retail and hospitality. In December alone, the NWLC found, the leisure and hospitality industry lost 498,000 jobs. Women accounted for a disproportionate share of these lost jobs, comprising 56.6% of the losses while making up 53.1% of the sector’s workforce.

“Whereas usually we think of recessions as hitting more male-dominated industries, this time the demand for workers was particularly low for jobs in which women are more highly represented,” says Tara Sinclair, an associate professor of economics and international affairs at George Washington University and a senior fellow of the Indeed Hiring Lab.

Exacerbating this demand issue, Sinclair says, is the well-documented care-giving crisis that has found women holding primary care-giving roles at higher rates than men. With the closure of in-person schooling, “women were basically forced into leaving their employment or cutting their hours,” she says. This created a supply-and-demand problem out of which we still need to crawl.

Sinclair notes that the starkness of the December jobs numbers depends on what they’re compared against. Women accounted for 49.7% of all U.S. nonfarm employees in December, a figure that is down from January’s 50.04% but is an improvement over May’s 49.2%.

“The last time we saw 49.2% was back in about 2008,” Sinclair says. “And so even though women have kind of regained their their relative role to men, by the end of the year, that doesn't make up for the fact that they had starkly lower employment earlier in the year.”

While the BLS data only looks at the American labor market, these trends are consistent on a global basis. A December report from the International Monetary Fund found that “demand for jobs for women has fallen disproportionately more than for men.” A year-over-year look at online job postings in June found jobs with higher rates of female workers had 40% fewer postings, compared to 35% fewer postings for male-dominated positions.

“Low-skilled workers,” the IMF says, “are likely to fall further behind.”

With the pandemic hitting new and worse heights by the day, Sinclair and Ewing-Nelson don’t anticipate the closing of calendar-year 2020 to also mark the end of problems for women in the U.S. workforce. A real and sustained recovery will take a combination of mass vaccinations, the reopening of schools and the rehiring of furloughed and laid-off workers.

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