Screenshot: National Women’s Law Center report

The pandemic is receding, but its effects have taken a dire economic toll on women, a new report from the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) explains.

The report — Resilient But Not Recovered: After Two Years of the COVID-19 Crisis, Women Are Still Struggling — draws on polling data and on “federal data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and U.S. Census Bureau… to reveal how women are really faring at work and in their lives after two years of a punishing pandemic,” NWLC says on its website. 

The results are grim. Women – especially women of color – have experienced more job loss than men, and they are earning lower wages than men.

The report’s specific findings include:

• “more than two-thirds of the net jobs lost since the pandemic began are women’s jobs”

• “while men have returned to their pre-pandemic labor force size, over 1.1 million fewer women are in the labor force today than in February of 2020”

• “Latinas’ unemployment rate was still 4.8 percent in February 2022, 1.6 times the rate for white men (3.0 percent)”

• “Black women’s unemployment was still 6.1 percent in February 2022, more than double the rate for white men (3.0 percent) and more than a full percentage point above Black women’s pre-pandemic unemployment rate in February 2020 (4.8 percent),” and

• “58 percent of women overall—including 75 percent of women who lost or quit a job during the pandemic, and 63 percent of women in low-paid jobs—said that the COVID-19 pandemic had a negative impact on their mental health”

The child care profession has also been hit hard, losing “one in nine jobs (11.7%)” since the start of the pandemic.

The report also includes women’s voices, among them:

• “Honestly, I feel like I have to start over completely because any savings that I had at the time went towards survival basically.” – Black woman, Michigan; has worked in different food service jobs during pandemic

• “I think parenting has just become more, I would say, times two. Because it never ends, so it just became double.” – Black woman, Maryland; laid off from position as a social worker and now working several part-time jobs as a cashier and child caregiver in others’ homes

To address this crisis, the report calls for a “woman-centered recovery.”

“We cannot equate recovery with a return to a broken pre-pandemic status quo,” the report explains. “Delivering these long overdue reforms will ensure we instead build a new and better economy that finally works for women—and for all of us.”

This new and better economy would include policies that strengthen families and individuals by, in part, providing:

• paid family and medical leave for all workers

• high-quality affordable child care that costs no more than 7 percent of a family’s income

• living wages for early educators

• free pre-K for all 3- and 4-year-olds

• a national minimum wage that gradually increases to $15 per hour, and

• increased funding for “home- and community-based services for seniors and people with disabilities”

As the report explains, these and other policies are extremely popular. NWLC polling has found that “at least three-quarters of respondents—and even higher shares of women, especially women of color—support enacting universal paid family and medical leave” as well as expanded access to high-quality, affordable child care; free pre-K; and higher wages for “workers in tipped and low-paid jobs.”

“As we enter the third year of the pandemic,” NWLC concludes, “it has never been clearer that policies to bolster families’ incomes, ensure access to health care—including mental health support and reproductive health care—without cost barriers, and help people both work and care for their loved ones are essential to drive a full and equitable recovery.”