Did the pandemic “supercharge” women’s careers?
I’m glad more women are being paid to work. I wish we weren’t still working like it’s 1999.
After years of depressing headlines about women and work I understand why last month’s jobs reports inspired so many positive headlines. One of the most effusive was Business Insider which declared “Working women's record-setting comeback.” The subhead went even further, stating that “the pandemic supercharged their careers.”
This enthusiastic headline is based on the fact that the labor force participation rate for women between the ages of 25 and 54 hit 77.8% – the highest rate on record.
Given how badly women fared throughout the lockdowns and remote schooling of the pandemic this is indeed good news. Or, we might say it’s not bad news. Women coming back to paid work is good. (I’d like to underline that point – the vast majority of women between the ages of 25 and 54 are working, they just aren’t being paid for the work they are doing, which is most often care for children, the elderly and those with health issues.)
And yet. While it’s true that June’s number is the highest on record it’s not by much. In fact, women’s labor force participation rate was 77.3% in April of 2000 – more than 20 years ago. It first hit 77% in 1997! For the most part it bounced between 75% and 77% throughout most of the late 90s. For the first half of 2000 it averaged 77%, then slide to 76.4% in the second half of the year – staying at or below that number until, ironically, February of 2020 when women’s participation rate hit 77% for the first time since May of 2000 having steadily risen in the second half of 2019.
This suggests that women’s participation in the paid labor force is returning to pre-pandemic “normal” which represents the same stall that we’ve been sitting at for more than 20 years.
And you really see this stall when you compare prime working age women (the term the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses to describe people aged 25-54) to prime working age men. Men’s workforce participation rate in June 2023 was 89.2%. This represents a 3% drop since 2000 when it was 92.1%, but is still 13% higher than women of the same age. (And, not to put too fine a point on it, but if a 1.7% in women’s participation can be considered “well above its 2019 average” then the delta between men and women is vast.)
And none of this should surprise us! The issues that were keeping women out of the workforce in the late 90s and early 2000s haven’t been fixed in the wake of the pandemic. We still don’t have national paid leave. We still don’t have universally-accessible affordable childcare. (In fact, the childcare sector is still missing a lot of jobs and we are about to be hit with the impact of COVID-era federal funding expiring.) School schedules are still not aligned to the workday. Kids are still out of school all summer (as powerfully illustrated by KJ Della’Antonia back in 2016)! The list goes on and on and on.
And while increased flexibility being offered by some employers (albeit often begrudgingly) is a legitimate bright spot right now, remote work and other accommodations are not a panacea.
First, not all women are able to work remotely or flexibility – either because their job can only be done on a job site (think teachers, nurses, retail workers, food service workers … the list is long) or because they are not the sort of workers who have power to negotiate for flexibility. The most marginalized women are seeing no benefits from this aspect of the post-COVID working world.
Second, many of us have real concerns that remote work will put women on a slower career track compared to men. In fact, the same Insider article noted that in 2022 41% of women worked from home compared to 28% of men. If being in the office – or even just being in the office more often – leads to better projects, more time with senior leaders and other intangible career benefits, we could continue to see women’s career progression stalled.
That disparity also likely reflects ongoing gender inequality in domestic labor — another pre-pandemic problem that has not been addressed. That disparity alone, if it persists, will continue to hold back women relative to their husbands and brothers who will have more time for both work and leisure.
On my most pessimistic days I worry that the outcome in 20 years will be a double whammy – marginalized, low-income women still struggling to gain a foothold in the paid workforce at the same time that college-educated women with professional experience are being derailed and boxed out of the C-suite because of lack of support for their caregiving needs.
Look, the American workforce is vast. There are more than 166 million people in the civilian labor force in the U.S. Small percentages can mean thousands and thousands of people. I don’t want to discount women’s workforce participation hitting a new high and how many women are represented by a 1% increase. It’s true that many of us thought the pandemic would set women back decades and that, happily, does not seem to be the case. But we’ve been in this same spot for decades, so the real question is: Does this increase indicate the start of a real trend up or just more of the same?
The reason I bang on about workforce participation is because so many other measures of women’s thriving hangs on that number. Being in the paid workforce is necessary for moving the needle on every metric we care about: women’s leadership, yes, but also basic economic security. Being out of the workforce depresses women’s wages, harms their retirement prospects and leaves them more financially precarious.
If women’s prime age participation rate only increases by another 1 or 2 points over the next 20 years we will not be anywhere near where we want to be in terms of gender justice and economic security for women and families. And yet, it’s hard to see how it could go up much more without far-reaching changes to both public policy and the distribution of domestic labor.
Source: All data is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and is seasonally adjusted. If you like to play with numbers you can use the BLS Beta Labs Data Finder.