By Alisha Verly-Jensen and Krista Kurlinkus
The Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 70s ushered in a new era for women in the workforce. Prior to this, certain segments of women virtually abandoned the workforce after marriage as culture dictated that a woman’s primary role was that of a wife and mother.
While Black women always participated in the labor force at a much higher rate than White women, married Black women were also less likely to be employed.
Forty years on, women have made considerable strides in the labor force, but also continue to grapple with serious obstacles.
In 2020, women made up more than 50% of the workforce, but were still much more likely to be unemployed than men.
The COVID-19 crisis laid bare how ongoing disparities in wages, job and promotion opportunities, and household responsibilities still put women at a disadvantage, and women of color and women from LGBTQ communities even more so.
When the nation lost 140,000 jobs in December 2020, 100 percent of these positions were held by women (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020). Sectors that were the hardest hit by lockdown orders included hospitality, restaurants, and retail, service-focused industries where women routinely outnumber men.
This shocking figure doesn’t even include the millions of women who were pushed out of the workforce due to school closures. When heterosexual couples discussed who would stay home with the children, the responsibility was far more likely to fall on the woman. In a 2021 report released by Harvard Business Review, more than a quarter of women were unemployed due to a lack of childcare.
In February 2021, American Progress reported that “Overall, women have lost a net of 5.4 million jobs during the pandemic-induced recession compared with 4.4 million lost by men. . . This equates to women only recovering 55 percent of the 12.1 million jobs they lost at the beginning of the pandemic” (“When Women Lose All the Jobs“).
Across the globe, women lost $800 billion in one year because of COVID (Oxfam International).
Although these numbers are devastating, they are only the natural outgrowth of the practices that have kept women from full, fulfilling, and financially rewarding participation in the U.S. workforce. Despite the fact that women make up a much larger percentage of the workforce today than they did 70 years ago, workers’ benefits packages have remained virtually unchanged since the workforce was majority male.
The U.S. government still does not provide paid family leave, despite most other developed countries doing so (Pew Research) or universal childcare.
Without the government providing for these basic needs and economic infrastructure, companies must empower women by including paid family leave, childcare subsidies, or onsite childcare as part of their typical benefits programs.
Not only does this resolve the cost of turnover or under-productivity attributed to a lack of childcare, but it also promotes a corporate atmosphere that values child-rearing as a form of work.
While working mothers face additional obstacles, the “cultural fit” criteria imposed by many workplaces for hiring and advancement puts all women at a disadvantage. Many women perform “covering,” a cognitively-exhaustive task in which a person represses certain aspects of themselves in order to fit into their workplace’s expectations.
It is no surprise that women with marginalized identities, including women of color and women from the LGBTQ communities, are far more likely to have “covered” at work.
Doing so produces a vicious cycle: workplaces restrict women’s ability to bring their entire selves to their role, pressure them into making themselves small, and then, using their under-performance as an excuse, look them over for promotions. This keeps the C-suite White and male, almost ensuring that exclusive and discriminatory work culture remains intact.
The corporate world is waking up to the fact that excluding women is costly. More companies than ever are offering benefits that enable all of their employees to achieve a better work-life balance, including flexible scheduling and remote work options. This march of progress is ultimately moving forward, but at an excruciatingly slow pace.
As recently as 2020, more than half of Black women have experienced racism at work. The fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic has also hit women of color disproportionately harder. Black women were much more likely to have lost a loved one to COVID and were far less likely to have received support from their managers or colleagues (Women in the Workplace, 2020, McKinsey and Company).
Addressing these deeply embedded issues requires more than a few mandatory diversity workshops. Companies that are serious about building an inclusive workplace where women and people with marginalized identities thrive must redefine and restructure the core tenants of their culture based upon the opinion and experiences of women themselves.
Alongside the push for companies to create and promote more inclusive employment practices, millions of women have taken matters into their own hands by starting small businesses. According to the National Women’s Business Council 2020 report, more than 13 million businesses are women-owned and led. Businesses owned by women of color have also increased rapidly.
In 2018, more than 60 percent of new women-owned businesses were started by women of color.
While entrepreneurship can provide women with the opportunities and flexibility they need to succeed, women-owned businesses still lack the growth potential and investment opportunities given to their male-led counterparts. In light of growing awareness of the ‘funding gap’, private investors and government agencies have pledged to increase their investment in women-owned businesses.
The Small Business Administration and venture capital funds have launched grant opportunities dedicated to funding and accelerating promising women-owned businesses.
As a small woman-owned and run business, we spend a lot of time thinking about and living the realities we’ve enumerated here. And it’s something we’re ready to act upon, collectively.
In the second half of 2021, we’re launching a brand-new community for women and female-identifying entrepreneurs. This space and experience will focus on changing the status quo of women in the U.S. and around the world, building wealth and community among women and female-identifying business owners, and going deeper into the individual and cultural values that we want our businesses to embody and advocate for.
Interested in learning more?
