"The pandemic has impacted women differently from men in multiple ways. At the beginning, we really had a gendered shutdown, and that was because many of the industries that laid people off were industries where women were the majority of workers...If we think about private-sector education and health services, seventy-seven per cent of the jobs are held by women," said Stevenson. "And in September something real did happen: kids didn’t go back to school. The September drop [in women's workforce participation] was really shocking. If you take a look at what we consider “prime-age” women, women who are twenty-five to fifty-four, people who are normally in the labor force, we’ve seen their labor-force participation fall to where it was in the nineteen-eighties and it’s now back to where it was in 1991."
Read the full discussion in the New Yorker here.
