Lady Business: Women lost 111% of U.S. jobs in December; 2020 nostalgia, already?!

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 118th issue, published January 10, 2021.
 

156,000 Jobs Lost

So. Remember a week or two ago, at the end of 2020’s boundless blight, when the news cycle actually slowed down enough to devote multiple (!) days (!!) to the strange case of Hilaria Baldwin, an American celebrity-adjacent influencer from Boston who’s spent years pretending to be Spanish in birth, name, and accent? (“How do you say in English … cucumber?”)

That was fun. Could we have a few more weeks like that, please?

Instead, in the span of 72 hours or so this week, we saw a historic and pivotal election—and monumental payoff for Stacey Abrams’ years of work to enfranchise voters of color in Georgia—quickly eclipsed by: a record-setting 4,000 daily U.S. deaths from COVID-19; prominent governors doing their best to screw up the vaccine rollout (who wants to move to West Virginia right now?); and, of course, a violent and deadly mob of hate-spewing rioters allowed to break into the nation’s Capitol, in support of an outgoing president who has spent the past five years using a privately-owned social media platform to publicly stoke their worst tendencies.

It culminated Friday night in a business decision that, it became very clear, could have been made much earlier: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey called in from his international vacation (!!!) in French Polynesia (!!!!)—a place the CDC has advised U.S. residents not to travel to given, you know, the global pandemic that is now killing 4,000 of us every day—and finally blocked a troll.

And yet that list above omits plenty of other important news stories that happened this week, including numbers that made me gasp when I first read them: Women accounted for 100% of the 140,000 jobs shed by the U.S. economy in December. Actually, it’s even worse than that:
 

Technically, women accounted for more than 111% of jobs lost last month. The U.S. economy lost a net 140,000 jobs in December, the first month since April that total payrolls declined, the Labor Department said Friday. But women lost 156,000 jobs overall during the month, while men gained 16,000 jobs, according to an analysis by the National Women's Law Center (NWLC).

The government's grim monthly report, the last released under President Trump, shows the pandemic's ongoing wreckage of the U.S. economy—and the extent to which that damage has been felt by women, especially women of color. Black and Latina women working in retail, restaurants, and other "essential" service-sector industries, often for very low pay, have been disproportionately laid off amid the pandemic's lockdowns and business closures.

This is another slow-moving disaster of the pandemic, one of equal gravity to 370,000 U.S. deaths. Almost 2.1 million women have completely left the workforce since the pandemic began in February—meaning they aren’t even looking for work. Last month alone, 154,000 Black women left the labor force.

Many of these women can’t afford to step back and focus full-time on childcare, while a partner continues working. But they also don’t have any other option. “If you are in a low-wage service sector job, you're not able to work from home and try to take care of your kids in between conference calls,” the NWLC’s Emily Martin told me. “Those are jobs where, if you have a caregiving crisis, you may just have to leave the workforce entirely.”

Which has long-term ramifications for these women, and their future financial security. If you leave the workforce, you not only give up your current salary and ability to actively save for retirement; you also weaken your power to negotiate with future employers, who already pay white women less than they pay white men, pay Black women even less, and pay Latinas worst of all.
 
“For Black women and Latinas, the wage gap has robbed them of their ability to have savings; when they reenter the workforce, they’re going to be more likely to just take the first thing that comes along—often at a lower level than where they were before,” the NWLC’s Jasmine Tucker told my colleague Emma Hinchliffe last month, in a grim assessment of the pandemic’s long-term economic consequences for working women.

“The impact is going to be long and hard,” she said. “Without any action now, there’s just no way that women are going to claw back and recoup the losses.”
 
Thank you for reading, commenting, and subscribing to this newsletter! Please tell your friends to sign up here, let me know what you think about this week's issue, and what else you'd like to see me write about: maria.aspan@gmail.com