Forces driving the purge of working women are strikingly similar country to country in the first female recession
The numbers are crushing: by the end of April 2020, less than half of the women in Brazil were employed, the lowest level in 30 years. In Australia, around the same time, nearly a 10th of women exited the workforce, while in Japan, women lost jobs at nearly twice the rate of men. In March, US Vice-President Kamala Harris deemed the exodus a “national emergency”, with 3.5-million mothers of school-aged children in the country having left their jobs between March and April 2020.
The child-care crisis has driven a workforce gender gap for decades. The pandemic, which some economists have dubbed the US’s first female recession, has made it undeniably worse. According to Oxfam, the pandemic cost women globally at least $800bn in lost income in 2020, “equivalent to more than the combined GDP of 98 countries”.
It worked. Research found that the programme helped support an eventual bounce-back in women’s employment because it kept many day-care centres from closing permanently, preventing supply issues later on. By September 2020, women’s labour force participation in Australia had rebounded stronger than that for men.
In 2005, the country’s Liberal government had signed agreements with all 10 provinces to roll out a national child-care programme, only to fall apart a year later when the Conservative government took over.
Child-care advocates are hoping the pandemic, which battered sectors with high female employment and led millions of women to leave the workforce, will be a turning point. Congress’s nearly $2-trillion stimulus package passed in March expanded the child tax credit and appropriated $24bn to help child-care providers. For millions of American families, that expansion meant monthly payments starting in mid-July of up to $300 a child. But the boost is temporary.
Despite the growing pressure for parental benefits such as paid leave, the UK treasury did not include any financial support for child care in its most recent budget statement in March. Instead, says Christina Palmou, an economist at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, the research group founded by the nation’s former prime minister, “the UK has set priorities for recovery heavily skewed towards male-dominated sectors such as construction, infrastructure and tech”.
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