When state governments shut down places of business and closed schools in March 2020, many Americans either lost or left their jobs. Two years after President Donald Trump declared a state of emergency, a local economist and college professor has published a book about women in the workforce, including the effects of recessions on this significant segment of the labor market.

Susan Averett, Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics at Lafayette College, co-authored “Women in the Workforce: What Everyone Needs to Know” with Laura M. Argys, an economics professor and associate dean at the University of Colorado. Averett spoke with the Press about the effect of pandemic mitigation policies on women’s employment, as well as other challenges facing women in the workforce.

Averett remarks on the unusual nature of the coronavirus crisis recession. Typical recessions, she explains, involve downturns in the business cycle, and many occupations in which women are overrepresented – such as childcare and hospitality – are less affected than male-dominated industries like construction. In the current economic crisis, however, governments closed hospitality venues, and school closures drove many women to leave the labor force or scale back their participation.

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) fellow Stefanie Stantcheva, in her working paper, “Inequalities in the Times of a Pandemic,” offers three reasons for what economists have termed “the she-cession.” Like Averett, Stantcheva notes the overrepresentation of women in “occupations that were hardest hit by lockdowns,” and the fact that women were more likely to quit or reduce their hours in order to supervise online classes for children barred from in-person schooling. Stantcheva also notes that, “a larger share of women [than men] had part-time or alternative work contracts pre-COVID-19, [and] firms are more likely to shelter workers in permanent work contracts.”

Although some women have returned to the workforce – January 2022 data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis shows women’s labor force participation at 56.8 percent, up from 54.6 percent in April 2020 – the negative effects of lost work linger.

“I think this will hurt all women in the long term,” Averett notes, “because they’ve lost out on advancement at the job. They’ve lost out on improving their skill set.”

The economic impact of job losses among working parents is significant. In another NBER working paper, David Green and his colleagues determined that the work product of the “workers-needing-childcare” (WNC) subsector accounts for 5.9 percent of Canada’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). (This figure is higher if spouses split childcare equally, rather than the lower-paid partner taking the lion’s share.) In the United States, the Becker-Friedman Institute for Economic Research at the University of Chicago found that more than 21 percent of the workforce has a child under 14 and no available caregiver in the household. That figure is nearly 11 percent when applied only to families with school-aged children between ages 6 and 14-families that struggled when one parent needed to be home for much of the past two years to supervise remote schooling.

Averett acknowledges the career hit taken by working academic parents – particularly mothers – over the past two years. NBER research by Tatyana Deryugina and colleagues published in January 2021 shows that women with children lost an hour of research time per day more than childless men during the coronavirus crisis; men with children lost 30 minutes compared to their childless male colleagues. In a “publish or perish” climate, these setbacks can have lasting effects.

However, Averett notes that some institutions, including Lafayette College, tried to mitigate the long-term career damage of the coronavirus crisis.

“If you were untenured,” for example, she explains, “you could stop your tenure clock. There was some realization that this was going to hit people.” These provisions helped not just “women who were supervising online schooling,” but also “faculty who depended on a lab that they did not have access to.”

Overall, though, Averett says the coronavirus crisis has highlighted the need for widespread change, not only in worker benefits like paid parental leave, but also in the division of household labor.

“One of the things that permeates my new book,” Averett says, “is that when women try to claim equality with men in the workforce, one of the biggest challenges is not overt discrimination – which does exist – but the unequal sharing of household chores. Even though men have stepped up, it’s overwhelmingly women who take on childcare, elder care. That’s not necessarily COVID-related, but COVID brought to the forefront how important that is.”