[The Soup Nazi]

This is just fucked up. From Zakaria's newsletter:

Covid-19’s ‘She-Cession’

As Covid-19 lays waste to much of the economy, that's what some have dubbed one aspect of its wreckage: a “she-cession” that has seen women bear more of the collapse.

US government data show that “women accounted for all the job losses in December, losing 156,00 jobs, while men gained 16,000,” as CNN's Kwegyirba Croffie reported earlier this month. “More than 2.1 million women have left the US labor market completely since the beginning of the pandemic, 20% more than the number of men, according to” the employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

At Foreign Affairs, a quintuple-bylined essay warned in January that as women exit the labor force, see their incomes drop, and carry a burden of lockdown caregiving, “even the modest economic gains that women have made in recent decades” stand to be “lost” if policymakers don’t act.

The effect is being felt across countries with vastly disparate economies, noted the authors, Jamille Bigio, Kweilin Ellingrud, Mekala Krishnan, Anu Madgavkar, and Rachel Vogelstein. In India, women are dropping from the labor force at 2.5 times the rate men are, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy; a “December analysis by the International Labor Organization found that in Germany, women’s wages had declined by 8.6 percent, nearly double the drop of men”; a “report by Oxfam and Promundo found that women in the United States were spending ten to 15 hours more per week on caregiving responsibilities than they had before the pandemic.”

“Just before the pandemic hit, for the first time ever, for a couple months, we had more women employed than men,” Center for American Progress economist Michael Madowitz tells The New York Times, for a series of articles on how the pandemic hangs on American mothers, their incomes, and their minds like an unruly toddler. “And now we are back to late 1980s levels of women in the labor force.”

Solutions exist, the Foreign Affairs authors wrote—including more government support for childcare and expanding women's access to financial services—and they argue these changes would benefit the entire economy, not just women.