Lady Business: The final frontier for 865,000 women; Virtual Paris visits
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 113th issue, published October 25, 2020.
Labor Pains
As a teenage science-fiction nerd, some of my reading guilty pleasures were Star Trek novels. The quality varied widely: Some were great fiction on their own merits, written by accomplished and widely-praised authors; some were unmemorably bad; and some were delightfully bonkers. (One of my latter favorites sent Kirk and Spock et al to a planet full of singing cat people to cure, sigh, an interstellar pandemic.)
Like all science fiction that tries to imagine a more idealistic future, these books were inevitably shaped and sometimes damaged by the authors’ current biases. I remember being deeply irritated by a throwaway line in one otherwise-forgotten Star Trek novel, imagining a more enlightened 23rd century but written before the end of the 20th, which dismissed the “women’s liberation” movement as a passing, failed social experiment. Gender equality, in this author’s view, was an irrelevant fad that could only hold back humanity (or, more accurately, “mankind”) on its inevitable march towards progress and enlightenment and a post-capitalist interstellar economy.
I’ve been thinking about that dated prediction a lot this month, with the bleak news that 865,000 women dropped out of the workforce in September, or four times as many men who stopped working or looking for work. These numbers are only the latest evidence of COVID-19’s devastating economic impact on women, who have never made as much money as their male counterparts and who are now shouldering an outsize burden of the pandemic’s job losses and childcare obligations. And the toll is, terribly predictably, worst for the women of color who were already more likely to be low-wage workers.
This year has erased decades of slow workplace progress by women, who in 1958 made up less than a third of the U.S. labor force, as The 19th* reported in early August:
Women’s gains in the labor market helped create an economy that, according to some estimates, is $2 trillion larger than it would have been if women’s participation levels remained where they were in 1970, when it really started to skyrocket. … In December 2019, when coronavirus was still but a distant headline in China, women surpassed men at 50.04 percent of the labor force.
It was a fleeting breakthrough. Nearly 11 million jobs held by women disappeared from February to May, erasing a decade of job gains by women in the labor force.
…Depending on the length of this recession and when an effective treatment or vaccine for COVID-19 is developed, there is a real possibility many jobs lost by women will never come back, said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
This economic recession can’t be assessed in a vacuum—or dismissed as an inevitable consequence of a natural disaster, one that humans and our elected officials can do nothing to fix. Many women can’t afford to continue working when they don’t have affordable childcare and still shoulder the majority of the burden for housework and home schooling in the pandemic (despite what their husbands might think).
And those are the relatively privileged women who can afford to make that choice. Low-wage workers, who are more likely to be Black, Hispanic, and/or female, have been hardest-hit by pandemic-related job losses and pandemic-related health crises, without adequate unemployment or healthcare benefits to address either catastrophe.
These are problems that are more difficult to solve than lip service to diversity and inclusion and gender equality. I don’t worry that the conversation about this generation of “women’s liberation” will go away anytime soon—but it's becoming even more certain that, without active choices by policymakers and others in power, it will take humanity several more centuries to get to our more enlightened, and equal, future.
Lady Bits
—In the absence of being able to actually, you know, visit Paris, I am grateful for Elaine Sciolino’s latest book about the city where she was a longtime New York Times bureau chief (and where she gave me my first journalism job!). The Seine: The River That Made Paris, is out in paperback and is Barnes and Noble’s nonfiction pick for October, “a delightful read that can be consumed bit by bit or in one bite,” and “a vivid, enchanting portrait of the world’s most irresistible river.”
—"It always returns to this for me — who should be in prison, and for how long?" A nuanced and personal assessment of Kamala Harris’s past as a prosecutor, and its impact on Black people in America.
—"GLOW was canceled. I am sad. It was the best job I’ll ever have.” Betty Gilpin’s wonderful farewell to one of Netflix’s latest women-led casualties.
—I returned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art this month for the fantastic Jacob Lawrence special exhibit (pandemic silver lining: crowd control means actually being able to see the art and read the captions!) and am delighted by this story about how it led to the discovery of one of Lawrence’s missing paintings, hanging in an Upper West Side apartment.
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