The Plight Of Women In The Workforce

By DEACON MIKE MANNO

This month, the 8th to be exact, was celebrated as International Women’s Day. It was, apparently, a big deal and I almost missed it. But I quickly caught on when photos of Eleanor Roosevelt, Barbara Walters, Clara Barton, and other notable women started appearing on my daily news feed.
I don’t mean to diminish it, but for me it was like a husband who forgot his wedding anniversary. That’s something that you might get away with once — anything beyond that, well, see a lawyer and do your best to keep your pension.
But for the few who are allowed to make amends, let me do that right now. Actually I started watching this subject some time ago, but I think it’s time to bring it to your attention now. And while this issue clearly affects women more than men (you’ll have to pardon me here, I’m assuming there are only two sexes). The issue is COVID, childcare, and closed schools. Bad for everybody, bad for families, and much badder for women.
During the span of my lifetime, women in society have made remarkable gains in nearly all areas: academic, sports, science, business, and politics, just to mention a few. However, it seems that lately society is trying to consign them, or at least most of them, back to the second-class status to which the leaders of the women’s movement claimed they were originally confined.
The obvious, of course, is the gender-blending advocates that want to allow biologically stronger males to compete in athletic competitions against females, denying them the opportunity to compete in a fair contest, including the loss of scholarships and advancement into certain areas of women’s pro sports. You know who is pushing that, and why, and you should keep that in mind when you vote. However, that is not the problem I’m attempting to address. It is women in the workforce.
We all know intuitively that the COVID closings have been harder on women in the job market than on men. The reason is simple: Many women work in lower-paying retail jobs which were nearly eliminated in an attempt to curb the spread of the disease. They were, therefore, unable to work from home. Many other women, who could easily work from home, were unable to fully participate in that option since children, child care, and school closings made that almost impossible during the pandemic.
And nothing hurt these women more than the closing of schools. And what is pouring salt on their wounds, now that the kids should be back, is that teachers’ unions, who apparently don’t really care about kids, are refusing to go back to the classrooms in many areas. That fact alone complicates everything.
Recently a study by four university researchers from Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Melbourne, the Maryland Population Research Center, and the University of North Texas compiled a report for Gender and Society, which is described as the official journal of Sociologists for Women in Society. The title of the article is: “The Gendered Consequences of a Weak Infrastructure of Care: School Reopening Plans and Parents’ Employment During the COVID-19 Pandemic.”
The first thing I noticed about the report is that it was very left leaning in suggesting certain alternatives such as state-funded daycare and in attitudes toward governmental and employer responsibilities. Those are topics we can debate, but the thrust of the report hits hard at what is happening to working women with school-aged children.
The report begins with something that every member of a teachers’ union or board of education should memorize:
“The unprecedented impact of COVID-19 on schools has underscored their critical role, not only for children’s well-being, but also parents’ employment — especially for mothers, who continue to do the bulk of caregiving in families despite working for pay nearly on par with fathers. Schools constitute the most expansive care infrastructure in the United States, and school closures and uneven reopening have affected mothers far more than fathers. . . . Some fear that the pandemic will unravel decades of feminist gains in the paid labor force for women.”
It continues: “We find mothers’ labor force attachment worsened relative to pre-pandemic levels in states that offered fully remote instruction. As the pandemic continues into spring 2021, states with significantly curtailed in-person learning will likely continue to see low maternal labor force participation with the potential for devastating long-term employment effects for many women with children.”
To conduct the study, the authors took three representative states with different approaches to school openings to make their preliminary findings: Maryland, which adopted an extensive remote learning model, New York, which used a hybrid model for schools, and Texas, which used mostly in-person learning.
Some of their findings: In Maryland mothers of elementary-aged children were 16 percentage points less likely to be in the labor force during the first semester of 2020 as compared to the similar time in 2019. Over the same period the status of fathers dropped only five points.
In New York, with a hybrid method of instructional delivery with in-person education two days per week, there was a drop in the mothers’ labor force participation of seven points, while fathers’ rate of drop was four points from the prior academic year.
In Texas, where half the schools were in-person full-time, the fathers’ drop-off rate was only three percent and the mothers’ rate was 10 points, which the authors called insignificant, “a larger shift than observed in New York but one that is still nonsignificant and substantially smaller than the changes observed in Maryland.”
The authors observed, “When schooling goes fully remote, mothers’ employment suffers. This is observed clearly in Maryland, where mothers’ labor force participation was dramatically reduced during the first semester of the 2020 school year compared with the same period in 2019.
“Hybrid and in-person schooling in New York and Texas, respectively, were associated with a less dramatic reduction in mothers’ labor force participation. Across all states, mothers’ work attachment fell to a greater extent than did that of fathers, but the gap is widest in Maryland, where schooling was fully remote.”
The report concluded: “We find that the gender gap in parents’ labor force participation grew the most in states where school instruction was primarily remote, and least in states where hybrid or in-person instruction were more commonly offered.”
Similar results were also reported by LinkedIn, where mothers with children faced greater burdens during the pandemic. “That burden only grew heavier when lockdowns forced schools and childcare facilities to close: thirty-two percent of unemployed women surveyed in the United States said they weren’t working because COVID disrupted their childcare.”
LinkedIn’s chief economist, Karin Kimbrough, opined, “I think a lot of it was that women were just busy. They suddenly had kids at home, they had childcare or eldercare responsibilities. And so they were definitely pulled out of the workforce a bit.”
And Janine Chamberlin, LinkedIn’s senior director, commented, “It’s clear that Covid-19 is having a devastating impact on women’s careers. Women have been more adversely affected by disruptions to the retail, travel, and leisure industries which employ a relatively greater share of women and often aren’t remote-ready roles. Our data also clearly shows women are applying to fewer roles and are also taking on a disproportionate share of care responsibilities.”
And, just to be on the safe side, I called a friend of mine who is an HR manager, and a working mother herself, and asked if she saw this pattern. Yes, she said, and it goes even further. “They are not applying for jobs; not even for the evening positions.”
Of course with all the responsibilities mothers have in today’s economy, none of this should seem surprising. We’ve come a long way since Beaver had a stay-at-home mom, and there are a lot of reasons why there has been that change. Bottom line, however, is that mothers do have a more difficult time balancing job and family — something June Cleaver never had to do.
One way to help: Open the schools. If you won’t do it for the children, do it for your mom.
(You can reach Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com and listen to him every Thursday at 10 a.m. Central on Faith On Trial on IowaCatholicRadio.com.)