US workforce gender disparities widened during COVID-19 pandemic
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The COVID-19 pandemic has led to certain gender disparities in the US workforce, and the Pew Research Center reveals certain repercussions of the pandemic recession on the said workforce.
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The gender pay gap was not affected by the pandemic, but rather the number of female workers and the number of overall hours worked
Research conducted by the Pew Research Center reveals that gender disparities grew steeper in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially since women lost more jobs than men in light of the pandemic "recession".
The Pew Research Center said the pandemic was associated with an increase in certain gender disparities in the labor market, such as women 25 and older who had received no education beyond high school leaving the workforce (1.3%) more than similarly educated men (1.1%) between Q3 2019 and Q3 2021.
Other gender disparities were affected as well, whether adversely or positively; for example, the pay gap has remained steady, and the difference in the average hours worked by either gender has slightly diminished.
Effect of education level
Overall, women with a high school diploma have left the workforce more than men with comparable education; the female workforce declined by 6%, while the male workforce of high-school education has only declined by 1.8%.
Women who had received a college education, on the other hand, kept their jobs more than similarly educated men, with only 3.8% of women who had received a college education exiting the workforce in comparison to 4.7% of men leaving the workforce between Q3 2019 and Q3 2021.
Women and men who had a Bachelor's degree or higher made gains during the pandemic, and women more so than men. The female workforce of women who had a Bachelor's degree or higher increased by 3.9% and the similarly educated male workforce increased by 2.7%.
The research center attributed the decline in the female workforce to women being "overrepresented in certain health care, food preparation, and personal service occupation," which had been adversely affected by the pandemic.
Number of hours worked slightly effected
The Pew Research Center found that, on average, men were working fewer hours since the third quarter of 2019, while women's hours remained unchanged.
Women 25 or older worked 37.5 hours on average in paid employment, the same number of hours they had worked in the third quarter of 2019. Concurrently, men in the same age group worked 41.6 hours on average in the third quarter of 2021 - 0.7 hours fewer than they had worked prior to the pandemic (42.2 hours).
According to the Pew Research Center, the pandemic did not affect the gender pay gap; among full and part-time female workers aged 25 and older, women earned 86% of what men earned based on median hourly earnings in Q3 2021, 1% higher than what they had made pre-pandemic (85%).
