#4: Old inequalities die hard
Will the recession exacerbate or weaken timeworn gender disparities?
Painting by Ella Weiner
Tucked into a Labor Department report from January 2020 was a milestone that has only been reached twice in American history: in the previous month, women held over half of all payroll jobs in the United States. Economist Betsey Stevenson told a reporter, "I feel very strongly that a year from now, their share will continue to be over 50%.”
Welp. Stevenson made that confident prediction before the pandemic and the recession it birthed.
Though women have generally fared better than men during recent recessions, the reverse is true in this pandemic-based recession. Over the last few months, the U.S. workforce has been hemorrhaging women. Of the 1.1 million people ages 20 or older who left the workforce between August and September, more than 800,000 were women. More Latinas left the American workforce in this period than men of all backgrounds.
There are a few explanations for why women are abandoning the workforce. Women are more likely to work in that industries require a lot of contact, like restaurants and hospitality, that have been damaged by lockdown measures. There’s another pair of explanations, which are linked: gender gaps in wages and caregiving. If a couple needs to care for kids or sick relatives, it makes sense for the higher earner to remain employed and the lower earner to do the unpaid care work. Because of the gender wage gap, the lower earner in a heterosexual relationship is usually the woman. Hence, the woman drops out of paid work.
Then there’s the second factor: mothers tend to spend far more time on childcare than fathers, even when both parents are in the workforce (this behavior helps explain why mothers have lower wages than fathers in the first place. As I said, it’s all connected). With closed daycares and schools, the pandemic has tossed a childcare crisis in the face of parents. Mothers, as they did before COVID, are shouldering the lion-share of childcare responsibilities, according to an economics paper from August.
The potential impact of what’s happening now is grim. These mothers will lose months or years of experience on their resumes, lowering their earning potential for the future. Experts are warning that the gender pay gap will widen further. So I was surprised that the economists who wrote the August paper had some positive predictions. In the long run, they argue, this period may improve gender equality. Their model predicts that fathers will substantially increase the amount of time they spend on childcare, and there will be a rise in the number of married couples that have the father as the primary childcare provider. They write:
“Many men learn for the first time how much work childcare entails and the full range of tasks that it involves. Men’s increased awareness of the challenges of combining childcare and work may erode gender norms that work against men contributing equally to childcare.”
The economists contend that those changes, plus employers’ growing openness to remote work options, will create a “new normal”—a more gender equal normal—once the pandemic recession is over.
I’m going to run with the optimism here, in particular, the idea that traditional gender norms can erode once challenged. A recent paper by another group of economists exploits the differing cultural legacies of East and West Germany to understand mothers’ decisions about their involvement in the workforce. The economists found that the gender egalitarian culture of East Germany was “stickier” than the male-breadwinner model that prevailed in West Germany: West German women who’ve been exposed to the more gender egalitarian East German culture behave much like East German women in terms of when they return to work and how much they work—they return to work sooner and work longer hours than the average West German woman. In contrast, East German women who’ve been exposed to West German culture don’t seem much affected; they return to work sooner and work longer hours than their West German counterparts.
It’s pretty remarkable that the differences in mothers’ behavior has persisted well after the fall of the Berlin Wall:
It’s as if the East German women, in being exposed to a model where mothers worked full-time in the labor market, had crossed a rubicon.
The paper about Americans parents and COVID seems to predict another kind of rubicon crossing—that some fathers are getting a lesson in childcare, and workplaces are going further to give caregivers flexibility. Once those changes happen, the thinking goes, there’s no turning back.
Or, could it be, that, as happened after World War II ended, the country bounces back to gendered norms of pre-crisis times?
I’m still thinking about
Words: “The Students Left Behind By Remote Learning” made me appreciate just how thorny the decisions are about if and how to send kids back to in-person school.
“...roughly half of white students had the option of in-person instruction, while only about a quarter of Black and Hispanic students did. After a summer of renewed attention on the disparities facing Black people, millions of Black children would not be getting in-person education”
Sounds: Besides being a great yarn, this Rough Translation episode on a scandal created by a Chinese pop star’s fanbase is packed with fascinating background on fan fiction and Chinese political history.
If you’re looking for a total nerdout, I learned loads from hearing historian Rebecca Marchiel (who I remember laboring on this project when she was a PhD student and I was in college!) discuss her new book. It’s about a coalition of activists who successfully fought to get banks—the very banks that had discriminated against their residents—to invest in their communities.
I made
I was one of the producers for this episode on rage. The episode tries to make sense of why we behave so dangerously and erratically when in the throes of anger.
Now you know
It takes a lot of work and fancy equipment, but peanut butter (which I’m eating as I write this) can be made into diamonds. I kid you not. [Source: BBC]
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