Women Statistically Experience More Loss During The Pandemic

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Indefatigable as always. And as we reported earlier from Colombia, the pandemic is exacerbating society’s inequalities. Globally,

women are losing their jobs at a higher rate than men. And unemployment is even greater amongst black and Latino women.

“Washington Post” opinion columnist, Helaine Olen, has been tracking this backsliding. And here she is speaking with Michel Martin long-term

implications.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks, Christiane. Helaine Olen, thank you so much for joining us.

HELAINE OLEN, OPINION COLUMNIST, THE WASHINGTON POST: Thank you for having me on.

MARTIN: So, let’s just go back a little bit and just set the table for people who don’t know, and I’m not sure who wouldn’t know this at this

point, but that, you know, millions of women have either dropped out or been forced out of the labor force during the pandemic. And so, let’s just

focus on the United States. It may be a ridiculous question to you, but why is that? Why is it that women have been so — hit so hard by the current

circumstances?

OLEN: Right. About 4 million women were forced out in the initial stages of the pandemic. Only about 2 million of them have come back to work. And

the reasons are kind of obvious. Part of it, you know, was women’s professions tended to be hit a little bit more, like say leisure and

hospitality, women tend to disproportionately work in them.

But there was also, apparently, what we could call the children factor or the housekeeping factor which is the fact that somebody needed to take care

of the children and we knew this fairly early in, you know, schools closed and, you know, for everything but remote learning in most of the country.

And by the summer there was a poll that came out by — last summer, I mean, summer of 2020 that showed of millennial women.

So, women under the age of 40, a full third of that out of work, we’re not out of work because they’ve lost their job but because they were

responsible for children and need — someone needed to take care of the children. Child care are closed, schools are closed for adverse learning.

Small children as a rule, I don’t know about any children you know, but like kindergarteners do not sit in front of computers for several hours at

a time and, you know, and learn their letters without somebody standing over them. Somebody had to do the work. and that person often turned out to

be the woman.

And there’s one other piece of the puzzle to you, which is, of course, elder care. And that’s also becoming increasingly burden on women,

especially over the course of the pandemic for very similar reasons. Although, in that case, it’s also the fact that some people are now

hesitant to turn to other private arrangement. But this always just disproportionately falls on women.

MARTIN: Now, there are lesser trends around as the economy is starting to be open, as more people are getting vaccinated, there’s a lot of sort of

language around how we’re talking about this and a lot of policy pushes around how we’re adjusting to this sort of — I don’t know what you want to

call this, this next stage of this whole sort of experience.

You wrote a piece for “The Post” the other day and it’s titled “A lousy myth about moms, kids and work makes a comeback. Republicans are running

with it.” So, what’s the lousy myth?

OLEN: The lousy myth is that women are better off for not working or at least in the short-term, this sort of idea of women can temporarily opt

out. And for viewers who don’t recall this, in about 15 years ago, there was a very famous “New York Times” story where they profiled these very

high — I think for the most part, high earning professional, you know, multi credentialed degreed women who had, you know, sort of throwing up

their hands at the workplace. You know, their families were not helping out enough, their husbands were not helping out enough, their work wasn’t

flexible enough, their kids needed help. And they said, I’m going to temporarily take a pause out of the workplace. And they called it the opt

out a little bit.

And most of them were fairly certain they’d be able to opt back in either at will or with some rejiggering, but not a huge issue. And when people

study this and when they went to look back years later, what turned out was that opting out was kind of — sort of women taking responsibility for a

mass systemic economic social failure, which is that there wasn’t enough childcare, work hours in the United States, especially for professionals

have gone up, work has gotten less flexible in many ways and that somebody had had to step up and take care of the cats.

And that these women would talk about choice, but as one researcher told me, actually, everything they talked about was constraint, how they

couldn’t do everything, how they couldn’t do this, how their spouse wouldn’t help. And, of course, when they actually tried to resume their

professional lives, you could probably guess what happened next, which is that they had extreme difficulty, many couldn’t do it entirely or they had

to change careers often for a much lower paying one.

So, it wasn’t really this happy story of choice, you know, that was done for everyone, it was really a sacrifice made by women that was sort of

cloaked in this sort of guise of loving motherhood.

MARTIN: And as policy following this, because one of the things that distinguishes your work is you write about both the macro and micro as it

were. Like you write about individuals and the choices that they are making for whatever reasons they’re making. But you also write around a policy

pushes that you say are often behind those, that people don’t necessarily recognize are, in fact, behind those.

So, you see a policy following this kind of lifestyle, sort of style section approach toward this.

OLEN: Right. So, there’s — again, there’s two tracks going on here, from the left or from Democrats. You know, Joe Biden looked at this ground

situation and, you know, his administration. Saw the millions of women out of work or working part-time and said, you know, we need to help. And this

was in his — you know, in his proposals when he was running for president and some of it is coming out now. Humans are infrastructure, right. Taking

care of children is part of our infrastructure. Taking care of the elderly is part of our infrastructure.

So, he’s proposed everything from, you know, further funds to buttress up senior care to, you know, universal pre-K, to helping lower income families

out of daycare. And this is all part, you know, of his proposals to help us recover from the pandemic.

And then you’re seeing the pushback from Republicans along the lines of, well, wait a second here. You know, taking care of children is not

infrastructure, right. Taking care of humans is not infrastructure. I clearly disagree with that. I just have to say that right here.

But, you know, secondarily, you know, the government is getting involved in your family. The government is pushing their choices on your family. The

government is subsidizing their choices on your family. You know, or wants to subsidize their choices so that you are forced to use commercial daycare

and, you know, this is the government stepping in in between the parent and the child, and it’s just sort of extraordinary.

You know, and this all sort of feeds into each other.

I don’t think the people pushing the opt out line are saying, you know, we’re helping Republicans. I mean, I don’t mean that at all. But it’s

clearly kind of, you know, running in tandem with each other and kind of feeding off of each other in some strange way that.

MARTIN: There is push among Republicans in particular to vastly increase the child tax credit.

OLEN: Right.

MARTIN: Which was increased in the prior tax bill at a time when all Republicans controlled all of the top institutions of government. OK. So,

what’s wrong with that? Is that a bad idea?

OLEN: There’s nothing wrong with the idea in general. Though I have to say the way Josh Hawley wants to do it, which is, is that single parents get

$6,000 and married parents get $12,000. You know, it’s obviously, again, pushing a certain way of living, right. Like I’m not aware that like single

mothers have lower expenses taking care of their children. It would be great if that’s true, right?

But, you know, there’s — so, there’s nothing really wrong with the idea of that but, A, how it’s being done and, B, the language to get around it.

Because the language to get around it is very much the idea that the government, you know, by subsidizing daycare is telling you how to, you

know, run your family. And me giving you money would not be telling you how to run your family, right?

So, it sort of picks up on the same thing. And when you see the articles written, like J.D. Vance wrote something about, you know, families and all

of this in “The Wall Street Journal.” The headlined at “The Wall Street Journal” was literally, children are happier when one parent is at home.

MARTIN: But we all know which parent they’re talking about.

OLEN: Right. Again, we all know.

MARTIN: Because parent is really code for mom.

OLEN: It’s always code for mom. As I’ve said, it’s been code for mom, you know, 1980, 2000 and 2021. I mean, it’s mom. And that’s who everybody

expects will be at home.

MARTIN: So, the other hand is this big push by Republican governors to revoke or to terminate the additional federal unemployment benefits that

had been passed after a big fight, by the way, to extend them, saying that it’s keeping people from going back to work. Are they saying that certain

people should stay home with their kids but not other people staying home with their kids? I mean, given how many family — single female headed

households there are one would think that a certain percentage of these households are using these unemployment benefits to sustain themselves

until things get sorted out.

OLEN: Some of this frankly is somewhat incoherent, right. It’s the sort of Republican dislike of any form of benefits. But there is this idea that

some women should stay at home with their children and some don’t deserve to, and this has been there for decades as well, as you’re — you know, as

you’re intimating. You know, there’s always been this idea that, you know, well, you know, lower income women, you know, they work for virtue or black

women, you know, they’re slacking off. You know, that’s the old welfare queen myth, right?

And then, of course, you know, the idea that other women, you know, are working for their vacation because they want to take a vacation. And that’s

always been part of this language too. So, the idea that you would cut out employment, you know, would be getting at the undeserving women. You know,

the women who, you know, really, you know, to their mind are often people who should be working.

I mean, I know this — again, it sounds a bit incoherent, but it is kind of incoherent here when you think about it, because it doesn’t actually make a

lot a logical sense.

MARTIN: Why do you think there is still so much disagreement about this? One of the — I was thinking about a conversation I heard a couple of years

ago, it was a conversation in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling around same sex marriage. And one of the — it was one of the people discussing

this was one of the lawyers who had argued the case, and successfully, right?

And a woman got up and said, gee, you know, why is it that, you know, the LGBTQ community is making so many strides in protecting their rights but

women are still fighting for theirs? And he said, because women don’t agree.

OLEN: Right. Well, I mean, it goes back —

MARTIN: And so, I guess the question is, you know, Republican women get divorced just like Democratic women do. Republican women can lose traction

in their careers and have difficulty supporting their families just like Democratic women do, you see. And so, why isn’t there more coherence vessel

where that you used around family policy when presumably, you know, families are experiencing many of the same things.

OLEN: I think a lot of it traces back to it. Again, I will point out that most people actually support all of this, right? Even a lot Republicans,

right? But I think it goes back to this idea that women are sort of almost — for almost all schooled in some ways to put ourselves second or third.

So, we never really prioritize our needs, everything comes first ahead of us.

So, the idea that other people or other organizations or other causes will benefit ahead of us is actually just almost sort of baked in. And as a

result, you know, it ends up other priorities, you know, come over it. And so, progress doesn’t get made, the sort of idea is, well, you can wait,

next time, next time, next time, next time. And it never actually happened somehow because next time is there’s always something else that’s going to

be more important.

And I think we really need to put ourselves first here and put our families first, because that’s the key here. It’s not just us, right? This is about

all of us. This is our families. This is our country. Children benefit from education when they’re smaller. They benefit from better care taking when

they’re little. I mean, keep in mind, again, a lot of women have to work, they don’t have a choice.

We benefit as a society if women are in a better financial position as they — you know, as they hit middle age, as they hit old age, as they need to

collect Social Security. I mean, right now, we literally have a situation where women are going to be take a hit when — in their Social Security 50

years from now potentially and we’re not even talking about that. You know, that’s going to have societal impacts too ultimately.

So, I mean, I think it’s really important that we say, you know, this is yes about women but it’s also about all of us. And taking care of women and

making sure they can do the best by their children is going to make our society stronger and better in the end.

MARTIN: So, we’ve actually seen a lot of stories being written of, you know, highly accomplished, highly paid professional women who are choosing

to opt out and they say they’re loving it. They say they like it, it’s less stressful, there’s less running around, there’s less, you know, crazy, the

kids are happier. So, if they want to work less to spend more time with their kids, is there something wrong with that?

OLEN: Well, I would say yes and no is the answer. Obviously, no, right? We live in a society where everybody is allowed their individual choice. But I

will point out several things about these stories. First, the men are all but invisible in these cases. You never hear from the husbands. You don’t

know what they think of all of this. You don’t know if they wanted this, they didn’t want this. You have no idea. I mean, nobody asks them. Nobody

asked them if they considered standing back from their work. I mean, it’s just utterly becomes this full-on woman’s world, right?

The second is, again, very few of these stories ever wrestle with the long- term implications of it. It’s like we all live in this perpetual now. And so, nobody goes back and asks, well, we were here in 2003 and 2004 and we

wrote about this and then we went back and looked at these women and we looked at other women like them, and we found out that wasn’t really

totally what was going on. And could this be the same thing that’s happening again? And those questions are just simply unasked. It’s — like

it doesn’t occur to anybody to wrestle with the implications of all of this and, you know, how this could actually work out.

And the third part of this is that no one seems to ask or very few people, I don’t want to say no one, but no one or very few people seem to say,

well, what could we change in work to make the stuff right? I mean, you’ll see, well, maybe we should emphasize part-time work more. But like nobody

says, well, what about the fact that, you know, professionals are working 45-to-50-hour weeks? Could we cut back and still be OK. Would that make men

happier too?

I mean, I know lots of men who are actually quietly unhappy about their workload but they don’t feel free to say anything about it. And, you know,

there’s just this sort of give — it’s taken as a given that our society is the way it is and it’s assumed that we will change our lives to accommodate

it and not that we should change the greater world of work to make it work for all of us.

MARTIN: Helaine Olen, thanks so much for talking with us.

OLEN: Thank you for having me on.