Lady Business: Is America giving up on working women?
Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 120th issue, published January 31, 2021.
The Broken Work/Life Balance
It wasn’t the biggest story in business news this week—yes, see below for that insanity—but the pandemic’s ongoing economic disaster for working women will be one of the biggest and most far-reaching this year, and beyond. I tried to keep wrapping my head around the damage, and the long-term consequences, in an essay for the new issue of Fortune, reported with my colleague Emma Hinchliffe:
“We’ve lost so much ground. It’s astronomical,” says C. Nicole Mason, president and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.
The numbers are shocking: 5.4 million women’s jobs gone since last February—55% of all net U.S. job losses in that time period. Almost 2.1 million women vanished from the paid labor force entirely. By September, three working mothers were unemployed for every father who had lost his job.
… The damage to women’s employment is likely to endure beyond the pandemic’s eventual end. Women who have lost jobs or left the labor force are missing out on future retirement and Social Security income as well as current wages and savings. Ultimately, some economists predict, the crisis will increase the gender wage gap by five percentage points.
Two things I noticed in reporting this story: Almost every parent I spoke with said they were excited to talk about this, up to and including the senior corporate executives who, as a group, tend to be a bit more reserved with journalists. And, given the subject matter, several of these sources were unusually transparent about scheduling our interviews around their kids’ schedules. One woman said she could talk as early as 6 am her time, and later mentioned that she would be catching up on email until midnight. Another was late to our call because she was taking her kids to the doctor. Another asked if she could reschedule our call by a day because her husband and children were all sick.
“For a lot of parents, this [pandemic] broke their work/life infrastructure,” Christy Pambianchi, Verizon’s head of HR, told me. This has become a women’s problem, by default and by impact, but it really shouldn’t be. And the solutions can’t be. After all, most of the authorities who can stop this disaster—the federal government leaders who could enact better policy for caregivers, more than 92% of the Fortune 500 CEOs who could provide caregiver-friendly benefits to their workforces, many of the individual business leaders and managers who could set examples and provide flexibility for their colleagues and subordinates—are men.
“Our children are watching us. They are observing how we all, as adults, respond to this pandemic—the ways in which we adjust our labor force participation, but also the ways in which we divide up the informal non-paid work within our household,” Misty Heggeness, a principal economist with the U.S. Census Bureau, told me. “I know my daughter and my son are watching me, and they’re watching my husband. And how we handle this pandemic is going to make a difference for what the environment looks like in the future.”
I’ll have more articles coming out about this in coming days—and we’ll get another, likely-depressing status update on working women this Friday, when the government publishes its next monthly jobs report.
Lady Bits
—Anyway, GameStop. Was what happened to the stock market this week the result of boredom, populism, regulatory failures, short-sighted business decisions by fast-growing startups and their big old competitors—or the fault of women who aren’t giving young men enough sex? Yes, yes, yes, yes—hasigh no, good thing that dude isn’t a prominent business school professor or anything. But, as Monica Hesse pointed out at the Washington Post, his Bad Take brings GameStop back to the bigger business story above, as “America has made it almost uniquely difficult to raise a family. This was true before the pandemic. For women, especially, whose careers, finances, free time and bodily autonomy traditionally take the hit.”
—N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became is such a great love letter to New York City, even if her Team Brooklyn take on Manhattanites is a little insultingly cold and mercenary. (It's also a very pointed indictment of white women and the villainy of complicity.) I was impressed by the sheer prescience of the novel, which was written before the pandemic but published soon after its start; the plot involves a sweeping disaster threatening New York’s residents, especially its people of color, which manifests in violence from Proud Boys, racist cops, and online-radicalized men disingenuously protesting “cancel culture.”
Even though it’s about a brewing apocalypse, The City We Became also gave me the vicarious feeling of being back in normal New York, visiting restaurants and bars and museums and neighborhoods beyond my own, getting to interact with people beyond local grocery store clerks on a regular basis. I’m trying to lean into the possibilities of my current capped routine—I’m cooking lots of soups, doing a lot of yoga, and exploring new parts of Central Park every weekend—but boy is my life boring right now.
—Related, “my life has shrunk to what happens in my home and on my screens.” Ann Friedman’s newsletter this week does a great job of articulating why even online life is also very boring right now.
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