This Time It's Different: The Role of Women's Employment in a Pandemic Recession

By T. Alon, Matthias Doepke, Jane Olmstead-Rumsey, Michèle Tertilt. Social Science Research Network, 2020

264 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In recent US recessions, employment losses have been much larger for men than for women. Yet, in the current recession caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the opposite is true: unemployment is higher among women. In this paper, we analyze the causes and consequences of this phenomenon. We argue that women have experienced sharp employment losses both because their employment is concentrated in heavily affected sectors such as restaurants, and due to increased childcare needs caused by school and daycare closures, preventing many women from working. We analyze the repercussions of this trend using a quantitative macroeconomic model featuring heterogeneity in gender, marital status, childcare needs, and human capital. Our quantitative analysis suggests that a pandemic recession will i) feature a strong transmission from employment to aggregate demand due to diminished within-household insurance; ii) result in a widening of the gender wage gap throughout the recovery; and iii) contribute to a weakening of the gender norms that currently produce a lopsided distribution of the division of labor in home work and childcare.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e2f370764e4fad03be99c94c00d3a62e5ac6f290

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Citations in the corpus

The Impact of Covid-19 on Productivity (2020, unknown): “6 market impacts of Covid-19, Adams-Prassl et al. (2020), Alon et al. (2020) and Mongey et al. (2020) and show the gender impact of the pandemic, Guerrieri et al. (2020) show that supply shocks can cause demand shortages, and Jorda et al. (2020) examine the longer-run consequences of past pandemics.”
Why Working from Home Will Stick (2020, methodology): “…WFH affects housing demand (Stanton and Tiwari, 2021), housing prices and rents (Ramani and Bloom, 2021), the division of labor within households (Alon et al. 2020a, and Del Boca et al. 2020), and residential electricity consumption (Cicala, 2020) – an incomplete list. a. WFH benefits will flow…”
The Long-Term Distributional and Welfare Effects of Covid-19 School Closures (2020, background): “28While we focus on the effects on children, Alon et al. (2020b) find that the school closures negativelyaffect gender equality.”
Gender inequality in COVID-19 times: evidence from UK prolific participants (2020, background): “The gender dimension of COVID-19 should be on the radar of policy-makers, and join Adams (2020), Alon et al. (2020), Hupkau and Petrongolo (2020) and Lewandowski et al. (2020), amongst others, to call for more COVID-19 gender-related research and policy analysis.”