Recession

Young Women Workers Still Struggling a Decade After the Great Recession: Lessons for the Pandemic Recovery

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a “she-cession,” with women experiencing a disproportionate share of job losses (Institute for Women’s Policy Research 2021). Young women ages 16 to 24 years old suffered the largest percentage decline in employment compared to young men and prime-age workers, mainly due to their concentration in service sectors and occupations that had been hit the hardest by the pandemic recession (Sun 2021). The outsized effects of the COVID-19 pandemic recession on young women reflect pre-existing inequalities in the labor market. Achieving an equitable economic recovery requires understanding how the U.S. labor market has been transformed in the past decade and beyond—to the detriment of workers.

Despite Record Job Growth in March 2021, Gender Gap in Economic Recovery Widened

New March jobs data show that nearly one million (916,000) new payroll jobs were added, yet only one-third of these went to women (34.4 percent, or 315,000 payroll jobs). This marks an increased widening of the gender gap in recovery for a second month in a row. Women still need 4.6 million more jobs to get back to pre-COVID-19 levels, compared to men who need 3.8 million more jobs.