By Chris Isidore
Many segments where women make up a majority of workers have already seen job losses. While hospitals aren’t cutting staff, for example, some 40,000 jobs have been lost in the offices of doctors and dentists and other healthcare providers. More than 70% of the workers in those offices are women.
In addition, women make up 94% of child day care services workers. That segment lost nearly 19,000 jobs in the official BLS report, and many more the more than 1 million jobs in the sector since then.
“The child care infrastructure has been decimated,” C. Nicole Mason, CEO of Institute for Women’s Policy Research, which estimates that nearly 60% of the 700,000 job losses in the March report were held by women. She said women have a majority of jobs in many segments of the service sector that are at extreme risk in the current downturn.
“What we see now is a service sector recession that is disproportionately impacting women,” she said.
