Stefania Albanesi Explains Why Women Lost More Jobs in Pandemic.
Written by Jialin Hou, a doctoral student in the Department of Economics.
How will the 2020 coronavirus pandemic affect the US labor market? The emergence of the virus has led to a decline in economic activity, which has primarily affected service occupations with high customer contact and little ability to work remotely. The transition to a work-at-home, curbside-pickup lifestyle has changed the structure of employment, with uneven effects on workers.
Professor Stefania Albanesi and her team investigate the pandemic's impact on individuals and families by occupation and income. They show that women are disproportionately represented in the service occupations most exposed to the effects of the coronavirus. This pattern differs sharply from what happens in standard recessions, in which men who work in manufacturing occupations are typically most adversely affected.
Working with real-time data on US employment, Albanesi finds that the female share of inflexible and contact-intensive occupations, which comprise mostly service and healthcare jobs and are most exposed to the Covid-19 shocks, is 77%. But this is not the only reason why women disproportionately lost jobs during the crisis. Female workers also earn less than male workers with similar experience and qualifications. During the coronavirus recession, firms disproportionately laid off lower-wage workers, and this also contributed to women’s job losses.
While during the spring of 2020, most of the employment losses were concentrated among workers with lower wages, Albanesi and her team find that during the summer and fall, higher-income women’s employment continued to drop. They hypothesize that this pattern is related to school and childcare closures. Again, since mothers typically earn less than fathers, they were more likely to reduce labor supply to address the child care needs associated with the impact of the pandemic on schools.
In some ways, the coronavirus recession does not differ from standard recessions, as lower-income workers and families are hit worse in standard recessions and they are also being hit disproportionally by the Covid-19 crisis. However, the disproportionate impact of women and mothers removes an important automatic stabilizer available in standard recessions, which is women’s employment. Additionally, protracted periods of non-employment for women may lead to a lasting effect on their earnings and possibly erase some of the progress made by women on the labor market.
Professor Albanesi and her team’s work has received attention from major media outlets seeking to understand and explain the economic impact of the coronavirus. The work is based on her prior published research on the determinants of the secular rise in women’s employment and the gender wage gaps, as well as her work in the gender differences in exposure to recessions in the United States.
Stefania Albanesi is a Professor of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh, a fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and a Research Associate at NBER. Albanesi's research interests are in macroeconomics, public economics, and labor economics. Her current research concentrates on understanding the determinants of household borrowing and default behavior, and on quantifying the impact of changing trends in female participation on aggregate business cycles. Prior to joining the University of Pittsburgh, she was a research economist at the New York Fed, an Associate Professor of Economics at Columbia University, and an Assistant Professor of Economics at Duke University.
Albanesi received her B.A. in Economics from Universita' Bocconi in 1996 and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from Northwestern University.