With Many Schools Teaching Virtually, Some Working Moms Have Been Forced to Quit

children are staying home. Heather Long, economics correspondent at the Washington Post, joins us for how the pandemic has hit working women. Thanks for joining us, Heather, Thanks for having me. I wanted to keep in on the progress with the

economy throughout the coronavirus pandemic. And one of the things that we're seeing from the last bit of numbers, this is coming from October numbers, is that more than two million women had dropped out of the labor force as of October, and the percentage of women working is the lowest since nine And one of the big reasons they think is going on with this is because of the uncertainty of schools across the country and kids having to continue to learn at home and doing this online schooling,

this pandemic recession. I love the term has been dubbed the she session because it's hurting men far worse in this respect, and as I mentioned, schooling is a big part of this. I think some of the numbers show that women with school age children definitely haven't returned back to the labor force. So, Heather, help us walk through some of these numbers and figure this all out. This was dubbed the she session, as you put it, over the summer, and initially that made sense. We just look

around our own communities. We can see a lot of these restaurants emptying out, hotels, entertainment, hair salons, places that tended to employ more women and particularly women of color than men. And so it wasn't a huge surprise that we saw initially women get harder hit. But what you're talking about, what really piqued my interest is what happened then in September. We started to see this big divergence

between men and women in September. And what happened is basically, as schools started up again and many of them were hybrid or virtual distance learning, whatever you want to call it, it wasn't working for families, and the person who had to end up generally doing this was the mom. And so there, as you pointed out the fewest women working since nine we saw over eight hundred thousand women dropped out of the labor flour, so they stopped working or

stopped looking for a job in September alone. And when October rolled around, sometimes you think, oh, is that just the fluke one month fluke. Nope, when October rolled around, men particularly dad to basically fully gained any of their losses from September, which were much much less steep. And when moms women are still very much struggling to get back to work and get back to jobs. And in particular what we're seeing is moms of elementary age kids,

so ages six to twelve. Basically, it makes sense your kindergartener and first grader cannot do virtual learning on their own right. They need that constant supervision. And you spoke to a bunch of women on this particular thing, and they had a lot of tough decisions to make. You can pay for childcare, but in a lot of cases people were saying, well, it just doesn't outweigh the cost. I mean, I will probably make less going out and working and paying more for somebody to take care of

the children rather than just doing it myself. And that was a lot of what you were hearing, and it's heartbreaking. I was thinking of an unemployed woman. I spoke to Courtney Allen in upstate New York. Substitute teacher lost her job like many in the spring, and she desperately needs the money these unemployment payments. She still receives them, but

it's barely enough to cover her rent. And she's got a kindergartener in a for scrater, two young boys, one of whom has the a d D a d h D, which makes it even harder to sit there on a computer all day and learning. And you know, she said to me, I have no good options. I need the money. I need to go back to work, but who's going to watch my kids. My kids right now are in a program that is distance learning, and so it's a terrible situation to be in. And we're hearing that over

and over again. She's a single mom, but it's also playing out in two parent families where it's often the mom who is ending up having to take a step back, scale back work, or scale back hours. And so what's happening now is a lot of people are hoping for more stimulus to be approved by Congress. So this money could either be used for child care services or just

to continue supporting the families. And it's really important because women that take time off for childcare and all that stuff, historically it's harder for them to get back into the workforce after you've been out of it for some time. So that's another issue. And you know, we talk about the constant effects of the pandemic, and you know, men seem to take more of it. On the health side, they're getting sicker and more severe cases and dying in

higher numbers. But on the economic side, it's harder for women to recover that way. It definitely is, and unfortunately, we have a lot of good data on this from the past Great Recession and from the past really twenty years, and what we found over and over again is when women take a year off to watch children, it has severe repercussions for their career. It's it's not only harder to get back in, but they almost never earn as

much money as they did before. They have lower social security lower retirement savings, so it just compounds for the rest of their life in a very negative way. So this is both a real pain for these families like Courtney Allens who are struggling financially right now, but it's also a detractor overall for the US economy. All Timately, our economy grows when we have more workers, and we've

been trying to get more women into the workforce. The United States already before the pandemic, lag well behind countries like Canada, Germany, even Japan and how many women we have working, So we were already way behind. Now we're even further back. I mean, it's just one part of the larger equation, but it's a very critical one to get our American women working more and getting kids back

to school. Obviously that's a big component as well. But you know, we're all waiting for vaccines, we're waiting for other therapeutics. It's going to take some time, but it is a critical part of that equation. Heather Long, economics correspondent at the Washington Post, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. I'm Oscar Romeros, and this has been reopening America. Don't forget different today's big news stories.

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