The She-cession is Fixable, And As Usual, It’s Up To Women To Fix It

How do we stop women’s jobs from hemorrhaging?

The question has lingered over the world for much of the last year. It’s the question on everyone’s minds that nobody’s addressing. It animates news reports and hangs over the dinner table at night. Unresolvable and barely even articulated, it’s the biggest economic story of 2021 and precisely nobody is acting like it’s anything more than a sideshow; there are, the thinking goes, more important things to worry about, things that will get you a spot on the op-ed page and get you those sweet, sweet clicks. “It’s too niche,” goes the assumption, “and I want to talk about bigger picture issues, like the supply-chain crisis.” And so we sweep it under the rug, stick it somewhere in the back pages of the business section. But nobody has sufficiently addressed it, and precious few have even made the attempt. 

We’ve experienced a clear pattern this year that I’ve yet to see covered meaningfully, namely that women’s employment numbers in terms of both new hires and lost work rises and falls with the pandemic in ways that men’s simply do not. It’s really quite striking, and closely follows public sentiment regarding the direction the pandemic is going at any given moment.

Fueled by a wave of warm weather and long-awaited optimism, people started flocking outdoors—which fueled a rise in hospitality and service jobs that disproportionately hire women, such as restaurant wait staff and retail workers. So, over June and July, our numbers grew by leaps and bounds, only to come crashing down as the school year approached while Delta was surging. October, at which point the Delta wave had crested, saw good news, but if the pattern continues—and there’s no reason to think it won’t, since nothing has been done to address it—I have every reason to expect numbers will start to tumble yet again. 

Why? Because our fortunes are frustratingly closely-tied to childcare infrastructure, which in particular is sensitive to these pandemic tides. When people are confident schools and daycare centers will be open and available, women find work. When people aren’t, women don’t. Sometimes we get fired. Sometimes we make the decision to step back. But that decision is primarily and overwhelmingly presented to us, and not our husbands.

Yet everywhere I look I only see horror or confusion; fretting over the numbers has become a bit of a national pastime, at least among the intelligentsia, who mostly sit by feeling helpless. “We need more childcare infrastructure,” they say, “and more funding from the government to provide it.” While yes, that is a massive part of the solution, it’s an entirely passive one that I’m not holding my breath for; I’m not in Congress, and neither are any of those writers. So, of course, there’s nothing any of us can do. Further, there’s been precious little effort to imagine a pandemic economy that doesn’t primarily penalize women when the going gets tough even a little; just the threat of school closures (which ended up not happening in anywhere near 2020 numbers) was enough to shut the door in August and September, and October’s brief window of optimism is already closed as COVID begins to spike in the cold winter of the Northern Hemisphere. 

The pervasive attitude, as far as I see it, is best described as that of battered residents of a coastal hurricane town: there’s nothing to be done but to weather it as best you can. Except that what we’re looking at isn’t some swirling storm but the snowballing of deliberate human choices in a system— the economy—built, maintained, and operated by people. And we know that, because different countries have seen women hit in different ways depending on pandemic decisions. In the US and Canada, for example, where schools had on average 52 solid weeks of closure, women’s job numbers collapsed. In France, where schools were closed for 11 weeks, the decline was much shallower (but matched by increased COVID mortality, as to be expected pre-vaccine). And what job gains we have seen are in low-paying customer-facing positions, not in career-oriented fields, which tells me women are not returning to those jobs in significant numbers. Women’s fates depend, to a troubling degree, on whether there’s somewhere for kids to go during the work day.

This is not a mysterious situation, even if too many insist on viewing it that way, and it’s not a problem that doesn’t have a solution. It just doesn’t have an easy one, and in a country where the slightest penny can derail the whole train, that’s probably enough to prevent anything from being done at all. The president might have pushed through his infrastructure bill, but it didn’t include a dime for childcare, and considering the ongoing controversies surrounding the separate social bill that might include childcare infrastructure and paid family leave (which has already been removed from the bill once, then added back in, albeit stripped down to a paltry four weeks), there’s no reason to believe it won’t get cut amidst fierce conflict over the provisions. 

When I was young, my parents had one lesson above all others: don’t depend on a man to support you. While the primary impetus for that was to foster in me a sense of self-reliance and industriousness—which worked, by the way—the lesson is much deeper than that. Women who don’t have outside income or at least the ability to obtain one if needed are more likely to be tied to abusive partners; if they leave, they have nothing. I bring this up because, in so many ways, the dynamic I’ve been describing feels like an abusive relationship: we have no control and the other party sure as heck isn’t going to offer us any.

I believe in women. I do. It’s a faith that has rarely disappointed me, because women are superheroes with get-it-done grit and an almost lupine tenacity in the face of obstacles when we manage to rouse ourselves (we really don’t have a choice to be any other way). I believe that that truth is a big part of why companies with women leadership tend to outperform their competition. And I believe that that truth can provide us a path out of this mess.

Ladies, I don’t know how else to put this but bluntly: start your own businesses. Patronize women-owned stores, coffee shops, aluminum siding contractors, marketing firms, medical suppliers, clothiers. The only people who hire women reliably are other women, and the evident dropoff in our presence in the workplace means fewer of us will be in any position to do so. That means we have to get there ourselves, and take that same grit, that same tenacity, that same energy and dedication and sheer, unstoppable drive you were going to give to OmniCorp Industries and put it to work for you. Women went wild founding businesses in 2020, especially, but they were primarily sole proprietorships based out of the house. We need women who can scale up and have every interest in doing so. We need women who want to lift up other women. We need women who recognize how deep down this mess is, and are committed to being a part of the solution. We need women en masse to grab a chunk of that social power that comes hand-in-hand with economic power so we can take control of our own destinies. 

We must be the princess who saves herself. Less Aurora, more Leia. 

I still believe. I hope you do, too.