America’s first female recession

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America’s First Female Recession —

For the first time since they began a consistent upward climb in the labor force in the 1970s, women are now suffering the repercussions of a system that still treats them unequally.

Men are still the primary breadwinners. Women are still the primary low-income workers, the ones whose jobs disappeared when coronavirus spread.
Mothers in 2020’s pandemic have reduced their work hours four to five times more than fathers to care for children in a nation that hasn’t created a strong caregiving foundation.

When the economy crumbled, women fell — hard. This year, female unemployment reached double digits for the first time since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking women’s joblessness. White women haven’t been such a small share of the population with a job since the late 1970s. And women of color, who are more likely to be sole breadwinners and low-income workers, are suffering acutely.

The unemployment rate for Latinas was 15.3 percent in June. For Black women, it was 14 percent. For White men: 9 percent.
All the while, women continue to earn less than men, with White women making 79 cents on the White male dollar, Black women making 62 cents, Native American women making 57 cents and Latinas making 54 cents.

What women in America are living now is the consequence of years of occupational segregation that kept them out of managerial positions, stuck in low-paying jobs with few safeguards like paid sick leave. When a third of the female workforce — the grocery clerks, home health aides and social workers — became “essential workers” this year, they were faced with difficult decisions about preserving their health or keeping their jobs. The rest found themselves more likely to be in positions that vanished overnight, like the housekeepers and the retail clerks, or on the margins, in the jobs at risk of never coming back.

Together, the losses threaten decades of steady, hard-won progress.

Read the full story: America’s first female recession by Chabeli Carrazana

📣 We want to hear from you. How are you weathering this season of uncertainty, both in the workplace and at home? Share your story with us.

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— These jobs account for positions that cannot easily be done remotely, like food service, health care and personal services.

— “Every recession is a ‘mancession’ except this one,” Stefania Albanesi, a University of Pittsburgh professor of economics, told The Wall Street Journal.

Read more via The Wall Street Journal

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Election 2020 —

Mothers are increasingly running for office. Will COVID-19 sideline their momentum?

By Barbara Rodriguez

Elizabeth Beck, Democratic candidate for the Texas House of Representatives, photographed with her daughters, Erin, left, and Ellie in Fort Worth. (LAURA BUCKMAN/THE 19TH)

In early March, Elizabeth Beck was happy.

The 37-year-old attorney had just scored a resounding victory in her Democratic primary campaign for the Texas House of Representatives. She celebrated by taking her daughters, then 10 and 12, on a vacation to San Antonio, several hours from their home in Fort Worth, where they visited SeaWorld and the Alamo.

“I gave myself a week that I wasn’t going to do call time,” Beck said, referencing outreach to donors. “I wasn’t going to do anything campaign related. I was going to give my daughters some time back.”

A few weeks later, Beck’s plans for her general election campaign were hampered when the pandemic took hold and her home life became hectic. The single mother recalled one day in particular, where she had a work project open on her laptop while helping her oldest with an online program that had replaced in-person schooling.

How in the world am I going to do this? she remembered thinking.

Read the full story: Mothers are increasingly running for office. Will COVID-19 sideline their momentum?

The 19th Represents—

Join us Aug. 10-14 for a series of conversations with prominent women in politics, civic engagement, journalism and the arts.

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What we’re reading—

Curated by May Olvera

Have something you think we should recommend? Tell us or tweet at us using #19thShares.

Can guaranteed income help Americans escape poverty? Ciara McDonald, a single mother of three living in Mississippi, was chosen by a local nonprofit to receive $1,000 a month for a year. The initiative is part of an experiment to determine whether a guaranteed income could help Black single mothers escape poverty. Marie Claire followed McDonald’s yearlong journey. (Marie Claire, July 28)

In 1920, Native women sought the vote. Here’s what’s next. Indigeneous women fought alongside White suffragists for the right to vote, but the 19th Amendment ultimately didn’t extend to all of them. The New York Times interviews a Native law scholar and citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation about post-19th Amendment Indigenous feminism and the work that still needs to be done. (The New York Times, July 31)

The motherhood penalty and the COVID economy. Even before the pandemic, motherhood came at a price: On average, women’s pay decreased 4 percent per child, but men’s increased by 6 percent per kid. Today, mothers have even fewer tools like child care to help them alleviate that disparity. Forbes spoke to women leaders about the gendered workforce. (Forbes, July 31)

We (still) need to talk about abuse in restaurants. Women in the food industry experience harassment from patrons and coworkers alike. When the most extreme instances of abuse are uncovered, people often wonder if they were facilitated by workplace cultures of complicit silence. But sometimes victims do speak out — and people aren’t willing to listen. (Grub Street, August 3)

The untold story of the Black women fighting to remove racist statues. The work Black women do in the struggle for justice and equity is often co-opted by White people who then receive the bulk of the credit. That’s the case for women who have been fighting to bring down confederate statues across the South for decades, only to be overshadowed by White celebrities. (Marie Claire, August 3)

What we're streaming—

🎧 Listen: Support women today: An interview with Jennifer Palmieri. The former White House director of communications under President Obama and communications director for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign speaks about the four women who wrote the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848 — their declaration of independence from patriarchy and gender inequality. (Fierce: Stories of Women Who Changed the World, July 29)

📺 Watch: Facebook showed this ad to 95 percent women. Is that a problem? A Facebook algorithm examines the contents of an ad to determine what its target audience should be, removing human bias from paid sponsorships. But what happens when the algorithm also promotes biased outcomes? A research group found that job ads for nurses, cleaners and secretaries primarily appear on women’s feeds. (Vox, July 31)

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