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A majority of the jobs lost in April were held by women, a sharp reversal of gains in the labor market.
“We should go ahead and call this a ‘shecession.’”
— C. Nicole Mason, president and chief executive of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research
The unemployment numbers released on Friday confirmed what we had all anticipated: The economic crisis brought on by the coronavirus pandemic is staggering, or as one research analyst at Bank of America put it to The Times, “literally off the charts.”
The scale of the crisis is unlike anything since the Great Depression. And for the first time in decades, this crisis has a predominantly nonwhite, female face.
“I think we should go ahead and call this a ‘shecession’,” said C. Nicole Mason, president and chief executive of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, in a nod to the 2008 recession that came to be known as the ‘mancession’ because more men were affected.