So You’ve Lost Your Job To The Pandemic. Now What?

It’s official. What women have been whispering to one another over Zoom calls and Facebook chats has become blindingly clear to even the most callous observer: the pandemic has hit women’s employment prospects hard.

If you’re like millions of other women, your boss began making noises about cutting costs or had already started layoffs within weeks of lockdown starting back in March. Or maybe you’re one of the many women who had been running a company, leading a startup, or managing a team that had to leave work to handle full-time at-home childcare and homeschooling. Work deemed “women’s” work is notoriously undervalued, and industries dominated by women – restaurant, retail, childcare – have been eviscerated by shutdowns, which are starting up again all over the country after a fleeting return to something at least a little closer to normalcy. And regaining the ground we’ve lost over the last 10 months is going to be a long and hard-fought endeavor. The job losses have rippled out across every industry, and when it’s time for cuts to be made, it seems clear that women are deemed expendable – we’re more likely to be terminated when there’s a choice between a man and a woman. After all, the thinking goes, if she has a husband, does she really need a job? Basically, if you had a job that was neither essential nor could be done at home, you were potentially on the chopping block. And while a great deal of frontline and essential work is done by women, we’re still taking the brunt of the pandemic’s economic fallout.