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Title: The Employment Penalty of Childcare
Citation Type: Book, Section
Publication Year: 2024
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Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic triggered an unprecedented economic crisis that required unique actions to contain the spread of the virus. Due to the infectious nature of the virus, governments had to impose lockdowns restricting economic activity and closing schools to contain its spread. Economic sectors requiring face-to-face interactions to operate, called social sectors, were hit the hardest, and so were their workers. Women have been particularly impacted by the crisis for many reasons. Women’s employment is highly concentrated in social sectors.1 For example, in the United States, 58% of total female workers were employed in social sectors as of January 2020.2 Women are also traditionally more likely to be in charge of housework and taking care of children. In the U.S., before the crisis, women spent 60% more time doing unpaid work than men (Alonso and others, 2019). Lockdowns and school closures have dramatically increased housework, especially for families with young children. This chapter investigates the gendered impact of the pandemic on employment across education levels and family structures from the beginning of the crisis to November 2022.3 Using U.S. monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) data, we identify less educated women with young children (at least one child aged 12 or younger) as the hardest-hit workers. To confirm this descriptive statistic, we perform an empirical investigation using a linear probability model of the individual likelihood of employment that controls for differences in sectoral employment, occupation, age, race, marital status, education, and geography. We find that being a woman with young children reduced the probability of being employed by three percentage points on average compared to a man with similar characteristics during the first nine months of crisis. In contrast, we find that being a woman without young children reduced the probability of being employed by less than one percentage point compared to a man with similar characteristics (less than half of the impact on women with young children). This result suggests that the risk of infection and intervention measures such as school closures that increased childcare at home are key drivers to explain the increased employment gender gap observed during the COVID-19 crisis. The analysis also indicates that by the summer of 2021, the pandemic-induced burden on women had dissipated. We also find that although women generally were more affected than men at the peak of the crisis, women with college degrees weathered the pandemic better than women without a college degree, particularly those with small children. Our findings contribute to the growing literature on the employment effects of the COVID-19 crisis that has focused on the beginning of the pandemic (Adams-Prassl and others, 2020; Alon and others, 2020; Montenovo and others, 2020; and Shibata, 2020). Our main contribution relative to this literature is to provide a complete picture of the gendered impact of the pandemic during the first two years of the pandemic, while other papers focused on the first months. Our work indicates that the extra childcare needs played an essential role in explaining the increased gender employment gap since the onset of the pandemic, a finding also in contemporaneous papers by Albanesi and Kim (2021) and Alon and others (2021), and discussed in Murray and Millat (this volume) and in Fabrizio and others (2021) estimated that the economic cost associated with the extra childcare is large. According to the authors, the effect of additional childcare on the employment of women with young children reduced U.S. output by 0.36% between April and November 2020. Our findings also support some early conjectures about the impact of the crisis on gender inequality (Dingel and others, 2020; Fabrizio and others, 2020; Georgieva and others, 2020; and Gates, 2020). The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. Section two provides a brief literature review about the impact of COVID-19 on female employment and its drivers. Section three provides an overview of developments in employment by gender in the U.S. since the onset of the crisis. Section four presents the formal empirical analysis. Section five concludes.
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Authors: Fabrizio, Stefania; B. P. Gomes, Diego; M. Tavares, Marina
Editors: McClain, Linda C; Ahmed, Aziza
Pages: 190-201
Volume Title: The Routledge Companion to Gender and COVID-19
Publisher: Routledge
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Data Collections: IPUMS CPS
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Work, Family, and Time
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