The Pandemic Is Forcing Women Out of the Workforce. There’s a Way to Fix That.

Opening more schools would be a good start. We also need to give parents control over the tax dollars that are spent on their kids’ education.

By
20

The pandemic is exposing barriers to equal opportunity that remain in American life. Access to affordable and high-quality childcare and schooling options is near the top of the list.

Considerable coverage has been devoted to the effect on the pandemic on children, particularly those from low-income families being left behind by virtual schooling. But we have a statistic that illustrates the problem from another point of view: American women are leaving the labor market much more frequently than men during the pandemic. The Department of Labor’s September jobs report showed that the number of American women older than 20 in the labor force dropped by 956,000 since August, compared with a decline of 307,000 among men. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the workforce participation rate among American women in 2020 has fallen to levels not seen since the 1980s. 

Many factors are changing Americans’ employment opportunities: economic shutdowns, reduced demand for some professions, and more. But caring for children is posing a specific challenge to working parents, particularly women who are often primary caregivers. The Census Bureau recently reported that 25 percent of parents (ages 25 to 44) were not working because of childcare challenges caused by the pandemic. Women were nearly three times more likely than men to be out of work to provide childcare. 

In the short term, this new childcare burden highlights why American schools should reopen, particularly given the promising public health evidence that it is safe to do so. Looking beyond the pandemic, reforming public childcare programs to yield greater value for working parents should be a bipartisan priority to improve economic opportunity. 

Create a free account
Access additional articles and newsletters for no cost, no credit card information needed. Continue ALREADY HAVE AN ACCOUNT? SIGN IN
20
By
Comments (20)
Join The Dispatch to participate in the comments.
 
  1. Avatar photo
    Jessica Hughes

    I think it is too simplistic just to say "open the schools." Opening the schools should be a local decision based on local disease conditions (including availability of PPE, testing, tracing, and ability to quarantine), physical plant of the schools (how crowded are they, can social distancing work, how much does that district rely on busing versus walkers/car riders), and the local population (as Scott N.'s excellent comment noted). Our local public schools (Alexandria, VA) remain virtual (which is not closed, just that the buildings aren't open) based on our district's inability to meet a lot of the criteria which would make it safe. Interestingly, when polled this summer, it was our lower-income families (mostly Black and Hispanic) who favored online rather than in person school; the supposition is that they have seen more of the COVID damage up close and remain fearful of the disease. Of course, this local decision making would be easier and better informed if there were a coherent national strategy and resources, but well...

    Collapse
  2. Jim Knight

    It’s reasonable to fear COVID-19, but this country is acting afraid. It’s a good thing the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 and not 2020.

    Collapse
    1. Scott N.

      Hey Jim, my long question below regarding Senegal was asked in the tone of inquiry not accusation. The internet is great but tone is hard to convey so I wanted to clarify that since the first sentence could come across either way.

      Collapse
    2. Avatar photo
      Adam

      I think it’s the opposite: if some people took the pandemic more seriously and we came together as a country on it, we’d be better off than we are now from both an economic and health perspective. It’s also different than a foreign military in that it can reproduce exponentially in a short time.

      Collapse
    3. Scott N.

      Would you consider Senegal's response to be "acting afraid?"

      https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-54388340
      https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2020/09/06/covid-19-why-senegal-outpacing-us-tackling-pandemic/5659696002/

      Senegal is dirt-poor, with extremely limited medical resources, and it so far has only 15K cases and 313 dead in a population of over 15 million.

      It has free COIVD testing with an 8 hour turnaround, handwashing stations everywhere, masking, temperature checks, treatment facilities and provisions for those infected, and regular official pronouncements about the status of the virus in the country, including sick and dead.

      Collapse
  3. Avatar photo
    Adam

    Just noting the irony that my wife here in Fairfax County will soon have to choose between going back to school with the risk of COVID or abandoning her job. Those are currently the options—there is currently nothing in between. I recognize this is complex; that’s just one perspective.

    Collapse
  4. Avatar photo
    Patti Scriffiny

    I am one of the teachers working in a hybrid schedule. Thankfully, our mitigation has worked pretty well - three cases and minimal numbers of students and teachers in quarantine so far due to the cohorts and small number of in-person students. It has been tough, and none of us feel like we are doing the best job right now.

    I don't have issues with being at work and having our school open, though I am skeptical that we could suppress a sizable outbreak if our entire student body attended at once. The one respectful request I would have for the author of this piece is to add one more component to reopening schools - PPE for teachers. We get one mask per week from the state, not very good quality. We are at higher risk than kids, some more so than others. Also, we are struggling to teach every day, and I can't imagine trying to do this from quarantine while I wait for a test to come back. There are no rapid tests available where I live, so if there is a positive case, testing takes several days.

    Collapse
  5. Avatar photo
    Matmos

    This hits close to home. I have two elementary kids distance learning and we are paying a tutor my entire take home salary so that my husband and I can keep our jobs. What this article does not address is the costs of providing education during a pandemic. Our school classrooms can only accommodate about 14 kids with 6 foot distance. Because of this there is a lower student to teacher ratio. The district has no budget for hiring more teachers and therefore there is a significant limit on how many kids can go back in person. The district has “solved” this problem by making distance learning classes much larger than in person classes at the elementary level and the other grades are hybrid. School budgets in our state were cut 20% because of loss of revenue due to the economic collapse. There is no federal help coming. Our district would love to welcome back everyone in person but it is not financially feasible.

    Collapse
  6. Nathan

    This is a great article - it shows actual tangible first steps we can make. Will we? No. We will probably debate it to death and use it as a prop to get re-elected. But great article nonetheless

    Collapse
  7. Avatar photo
    Jason Gibson

    Hear Hear...........been a long time since I read an article I agree with as much as this one. And that's saying a lot considering what a Dispatch fan I am. But this is a pet topic. I'm tired of being the lone John the Baptist voice crying out in the wilderness. Our poor children are drowning!!!

    Collapse
  8. Scott N.

    I think there’s an important explanatory variable missing here as to why the schools that most need to be open aren’t: the vulnerability of their populations.

    The schools being kept closed are most especially in poorer, minority-heavy, and/or densely populated areas. The facilities themselves are often old and run down, which in terms of COVID often means the ventilation is terrible. This will become a greater problem when the winter comes and opening windows or other airflow measures aren’t practical. These demographics are also much more likely to have multi-generational households where grandparents provide childcare while the parents are often physically working somewhere, either as retail or customer-facing workers or in factories/warehouses in close proximity to others.

    Combine these factors with nutrition issues, higher and less well-controlled chronic medical conditions including obesity and high blood prsssure, and COVID’s nasty habit of preying on black and Hispanic populations to a much higher degree, and you get a catch-22 situation for the families and the teachers.

    Re: race, it is unclear whether race is an independent variable with explanatory power of its own (such that an extremely wealthy black community with similar traits to an extremely wealthy white community would sill have higher covid morbidity and mortality) or simply is a shorthand rubric that largely fits.

    A wealthy family with each parent staying at home or in a white collar minimal physical contact job sending kids to school with other similarly situated families is much, much less likely to have problems even when covid shows up in a classroom than the school where many of the parents have multiple in-person jobs, live-in grandparent caregivers, and racial+socioeconomic with grandma as primary, live-in caregiver.

    The solutions to this dilemma from a health standpoint would be both complex, rather redistributive, and politically challenging.

    Collapse
    1. Jim Knight

      Very well articulated, but I’ve been living in this country myself during the pandemic and it’s clear to me the schools are closed because the unions want to make political points and exploit the opportunity to get more from the taxpayers. Of course, they have to create complex arguments so they can claim it’s not political. But it’s political.

      Collapse
  9. Scott Southard

    "Reopening American schools is a good first step. But addressing permanent childcare center closures poses a more complicated challenge for policymakers interested in improving the value of public preschool programs." Thus the conclusion is to give "parents control of their child’s share of Head Start funding [so that they might] arrange for private childcare," and this private childcare will (magically?) both be longer and "higher in educational value."

    Child care is expensive; the reason childcare is expensive is that childcare workers are expensive. (Any full-time worker is expensive, because we have tied healthcare to employment, but I digress…) Qualified, well-trained childcare workers are even more expensive. Somehow private childcare will be plentiful, cheaper, *and* better? We're in privatization of education as magical panacea land.

    How might we instead make *public* preschool, education, what-have-you better? Methinks the writer is not "interested in improving the value of public preschool programs."

    Collapse
  10. Midge

    "The Pandemic Is Forcing Women Out of the Workforce. There’s a Way to Fix That."

    Of course, there are complementarians who think it doesn't need fixing.

    Collapse
    1. Avatar photo
      Picov Andropov

      I strongly disagree with complementarian claims and do not think their theology is supported by the Bible. That being said, the complementarians I know don't have a problem w women in the secular workforce, and mainly see complementarianism as a practice that should be applied in the household/churches.

      Collapse
      1. Midge

        I said what I said more tongue in cheek than anything. I do know some, well, if they're not complementarians, maybe, um... masculinists(?) who claim it's just harder to motivate men in a feminized workplace, so that restoring men to a useful, dignified capacity in American life would involve restricting the participation of women.

        I know more people, though, who don't care what role a woman has in the workplace, but does want girls to plan for what balancing a career and childbearing might entail, including planning for less of a career than they would otherwise if children weren't in their future.

        Collapse
        1. Avatar photo
          Picov Andropov

          Ha, that must’ve gone over my head, my mistake. FWIW, I have had both men and women employers/supervisors and the idea that women in the workplace keep men from getting things done is ridiculous.

          Collapse
Load More