Last Thursday, President Biden unveiled his proposal for further addressing COVID-19 and its economic fallout. While the pandemic has throttled the U.S. economy generally, women, who are nearly half the American workforce, have taken the disproportionate brunt of the damage. As a result, COVID-19’s impact on women is a first-order national concern and relief proposals should be judged, in part, on how quickly and forcefully they address this impact. If not, we risk long-term economic consequences not just for women, but for the national economy generally.
The numbers are startling: The COVID-19-driven recession that began in March has featured not only the largest trough-to-peak increase in women’s unemployment rate on record — almost 13 percentage points — but also, at nearly 3 percentage points, the largest relative increase in unemployment rates compared to men in more than 70 years. In April 2020, women’s employment — in absolute numbers — fell to its lowest level since the 1990s.
The harm of such setbacks — even if only temporary — will not be confined to the families and individuals directly impacted. The Conference Board’s economists estimate that the decline in women’s employment since the start of the pandemic likely resulted in a loss of more than $550 billion in economic output in 2020.
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