Women in the US
Women in the US had increased their labor force participation from 55.7 percent in 1987 to 60.3 percent in April 2020. The COVID crisis drove 2.5 million women out of the labor force reducing the female labor force participation to 56 percent in January 2021. Why did the pandemic hit women harder than men? There are mainly three reasons: a) The pandemic caused layoffs in service sectors of the economy in which women are more heavily employed; b) the shutdown of schools and day care facilities in the United States meant that women, more than men, sacrificed their jobs in order to stay at home to take care of children; c) women were more likely to hold part-time or contract jobs that lack benefits, reducing their incentive to stay employed in the face of other demands on their attention.
The US is not the only country that experienced a deterioration in the gender gap, countries like Canada, Italy and Japan also saw large decreases in female labor force participation. But in the UK, Australia, Denmark and the Netherlands the gender gap closed by 0.9 percentage. In this paper Djankov et al. conclude that:
Our research shows that the policy lever that seems to have the most explanatory power in predicting the resilience in women’s labor force participation across advanced economies is equality of social security benefits and hiring and firing rules for part-time workers.
COVID-19 widens the gender gap in labor force participation
By: Simeon Djankov, Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg, Marie Hyland, Eva (Yiwen) Zhang – PIIE, World Bank
Women in France
In France the gender employment gap was little affected by the COVID crisis despite the fact that the pandemic hit mostly the service sector.
The widespread roll-out of the short-time work scheme, its adaptation to cover childcare, and the major support given to firms that were forced to close all helped to avert massive job losses and prevent large numbers of women from leaving the labour market, as occurred in the United States, South Korea and Japan. The reopening of schools and childcare facilities after the spring 2020 lockdown also made it easier for mothers to (tele)work.
Women and labour during the Covid-19 crisis
By: Clémence Berson – Banque de France
