Some of my research is in “Future Studies” - a field that uses analytical approaches for understanding how current technological, economic, and social trends will play out in the future. One of its tools are scenario narratives - rich descriptions of an unknown, but plausible, future states of the world.
Below, I am applying the format to explore how the COVID-19 pandemic will affect women, including those in the middle and upper middle class. I am quite concerned - I believe it has the potential to wipe out a decades of progress towards gender equality. Here is a possible scenario...
In the early 2030s, it became apparent that decades of extremely slow progress towards gender equality were halted and - in some sectors - entirely wiped out: Female work participation, which had plateaued for decades, shrank. Earnings in comparison to men, the share of women in management positions, and the number of female graduates with advanced degrees all decreased. Gender diversity in companies and colleges fell to levels last seen in the 1980s and were poised to shrink further. Increasingly concerned, economists and political scientists began researching “The Great Retreat” of women in and from the workforce. The COVID19 pandemic 2020/21 was largely seen as the turning point: even though it lasted less than two years it’s shockwaves had ripple effects throughout the rest of the decade.
The first wave was a tsunami of unemployment in the wake of wide-spread social distancing. It hit while hospitals were full of severely ill people, so that its particular toll on women never fully registered. The effect, however, was immediate. Of the 700K jobs lost at the very beginning of the pandemic (in February and March 2020), 60% were held by women. By May, women were no longer the majority of the workforce and accounted for 55% of all jobs lost. Initial losses occurred in majority-female professions that require close contact with customers, such as childcare, retail, hospitality, and beauty salons. This was quickly followed by healthcare: while the nation was focused on staffing shortages at the front line of the COVID-19 fight, offices of dentists, pediatricians, speech pathologists, and physical therapists remained empty and prompted layoffs of health professionals and administrative staff. Men fared comparatively better: their work in manufacturing, construction, warehousing, and technical maintenance required less customer interaction, was more easily done in ways that allowed for social distancing, and was frequently exempt from closures because work was deemed essential.
The second wave hit with some delay and was shallower, though more drawn out, and almost unnoticeable in its power to erode female careers. At the onset of the pandemic, when everybody struggled to keep things running, the motto was “all hands on deck”. Those still employed moved business processes online, reorganized supply chains, set up online sales, worked on COVID-19 messaging to employees and customers, and organized online capabilities for service, consulting, and education. After the initial shock, many companies, universities, and governments found themselves surprisingly capable of keeping operations going, though often on a much-reduced level. Smart companies used the slowdown for strategic investments in innovation and automation, while costs were cut in all business functions that were underused or deemed easy to rebuild. These targeted layoffs hit women hard: Underrepresented in IT, product development, manufacturing engineering, and on all management levels, many women were let go: sales operations, order processing, and accounting required fewer hours and could be restaffed later.
Nobody intended for these changes to be permanent but the day when “we reopen the country again” and rehire everyone never really came. Instead, governments and companies moved cautiously, rehired slowly and with an implicit and often unintended preference for men, while keeping capabilities for social distancing in place in fear of new outbreaks. By the time the economy finally rebounded, many business practices had changed for good, particularly in consulting and retail, where they never required the same level of face to face interaction again.
The third wave was quietly led by working mothers and women in their fifties, who had initially been able to hold on to their jobs: they began leaving the labor market in a continuous trickle that had begun before the pandemic but merged into a sizable stream after it hit. When asked, they usually gave personal reasons for not working outside of the home, yet these personal reasons followed a regular pattern.
Initially, working from home was novel and met with gratefulness and tolerance - colleagues and employers were amused when yet another five-year-old crashed a video conference. As social distancing and homeschooling dragged on for months, the mood changed. Home offices became less improvised and more professional-looking, video conferences felt less personal and more streamlined, and demands for productivity increased. Many parents struggled to meet growing professional demands while leading family life in the same space, frequently extending the work day way beyond normal hours into the night.
Nevertheless, when restrictions were lifted, home offices and telework continued to be used. They were needed to stay operational when small outbreaks lead to localized lockdowns. Some employers alternated between ‘home office’ and ‘on site days’ for their employees to mitigate infection risks: By offsetting the “on site days” of different teams, only a subset of employees were on-site at any given time, resulting in fewer people who could infect each other at work. Over time, these strategies were increasingly adopted as a cost-cutting measure, as companies got rid of personal office space and moved to so-called hotelling models. Such practices blurred the boundaries between home and work - a trend that had long begun before the pandemic - and set expectations of near-constant employee availability. Women with children and other caregiving obligations felt that they could not win: if they set clear boundaries between work and family time, they were able to convey professionalism during the hours on the job but were perceived as less responsive to job needs. If they allowed the boundaries to blur, they provided unprecedented insights into their family situation as a caregiver, which frequently evoked the “mommy-trap” of unconscious biases.
In response to the pandemic and stay-at-home orders, most states introduced some form of paid family leave, which provided the legal basis for caregivers to stay at home during school closures, which remained frequent: In the absence of a vaccine, governments relied on widespread testing, contact tracing, and hyper-local, targeted social distancing to sustain economic activity without overwhelming the health care system. Schools and daycares became an important modulator: School closures (often in the form of online instruction) effectively forced adults to stay home and thus triggered social distancing just enough to keep case numbers low without shutting everything down again - with little downside to the school district that could count online instruction towards required instruction times.
Online weeks became common, in particular after cash-strapped school districts learned to also use them to cut costs. Parents - mostly mothers - were forced to provide more care in the home, frequently without external help, such as babysitters, and oftentimes with little prior warning. For childcare providers, who were suffering from paper-thin margins as more and more middle-class families had trouble affording childcare, the unplannable interruptions to their operations posed additional risks and many closed their doors for good. Given the constant struggle to find reliable, affordable childcare, many mothers saw no other possibility than to leave the labor market - in particular women in so-called “critical” jobs, who were not allowed to stay home.
At the same time, a large number of women in their fifties and sixties dropped out of the labor market as a result of layoffs, which hit older women particularly hard. Many also left jobs to take over the care of elderly relatives, shocked by fatal outbreaks in nursing homes, where people had died alone after weeks of being isolated from family. Others were called upon to provide care for grandchildren.
The pandemic was traumatic for many and had caused considerable lifestyle changes for all: Weeks and months passed without sports events, concerts, movies, and restaurant visits, some shopping malls never reopened, celebrity lifestyles and fashion influencers seemed willfully out of touch, and recreational travel almost entirely disappeared for close to two years. Instead, families reconnected, children spent more time with parents and siblings than in organized settings, and households “DIY’ed” everything - meals, haircuts, face masks, tutoring, and entertainment. For some, these new behaviors, which came with considerable cost-savings, lead to a fundamental reassessment of how they wanted to spend their lives.
New cultural movements emerged. Some were led by women and echoed earlier nostalgia towards urban homesteading, frugality, and family focus. They made it more acceptable and desirable for women to not pursue careers. Other movements fundamentally questioned gender equality as egoistic and accused women of taking jobs away from male breadwinners. As a result, women who kept their jobs increasingly found themselves needing to defend their choices. A new generation of female high-school graduates began to think of paid work as a transitional stage between school and starting their own families. They became less likely to pursue a college degree than earlier generations.
Even before the pandemic, full-time working women spent on average four hours a day on unpaid work in the home (vs. 2.5 hours spent by men). New caregiving responsibilities, household work, and new cultural values disproportionately increased the unpaid hours women worked in the home. These developments were largely a result of how families had traditionally divided work but they also made economic sense: faced with high unemployment and the ever-present home office, families invested scarce time in the job of the male partner - it was usually full-time, paid better, and managers were less understanding when fathers needed flexibility for family work than they were towards mothers. Women, instead, prioritized the job that they could not quit - unpaid work in the home - and cut hours or quit their paid jobs if the income of their partners was sufficient to sustain a family. To make ends meet, women in these mostly middle class families often increased their unpaid hours further and canceled restaurant meals, aftercare programs, summer camps, and tutors. Their retreat to the home hurt workers in majority female service industries.
Women’s retreat from the labor market changed work culture and destroyed all hopes for a quick recovery. Female unemployment and a growing gender wage gap meant that roughly 9 million single-mother households in the US became even poorer than before the pandemic, when 27% of them were food insecure already. Childhood poverty skyrocketed, as did the poverty of women, particularly in retirement. Before the crisis, women over the age of 65 were 80% more likely than men to fall into poverty. With their careers derailed and no possibility to save for retirement, many female retirees experienced hardship.
Things also became tough for two-parent families, who had relied on women’s earnings: when COVID-19 hit, women were the sole breadwinner in 6% families. They also contributed 40% of total family income in two-income families. As women lost hours and jobs and missed out on raises, families had to severely curb their spending, further depressing economic growth. But the economy did not only lose consumers: women had been an important contributor of labor. Between 1970 and 2014, their relatively modest increase in labor force participation (from roughly 43% to 57%) had added 2 trillion (13.5%) to the size of the US economy. The accelerated trend in the opposite direction - women retreating from the labor force - now contributed to a shrinking economy.
At this point, the “Great Retreat” is conjecture - a thought experiment, not a prediction. Things will certainly not happen in exactly this way. The purpose of scenarios is to innovate and change the trajectory. So what could be done?
We will be spending large amounts of money to keep the economy afloat. What if we did it smartly: How about offering affordable childcare? This would employ many women and would help other women stay employed. What if we did this by creating small groups of children who stay together with the same caretakers and without contact to other groups? What if we re-designed their space? We would have to lockdown less frequently. School could look different, too. What if we cancelled the extremely long summer break and added flexible, small breaks throughout the year? We can align them with school closures when new outbreaks force social distancing. Parents can more easily provide childcare and work if they do not have to also homeschool. Keeping education in the class room would also be fairer to children who do not have technology and support at home - and keep more teachers employed. How about a double earner deduction in the tax code that causes couples to equally invest in both jobs, rather than focusing on the male job? We cannot avoid a lot of the damage but we can change trajectories.
Scenarios help us identify potential leverage points and start a discussion