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Millions Of Women Haven’t Rejoined The Workforce

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Millions Of Women Haven’t Rejoined The Workforce

On the day in April 2020 that Valerie Mekki lost her job, she was scared to share the bad news with her children. So she hid in her room for 45 minutes.

“I just didn’t want to face them,” says Mekki, who worked in fashion merchandising for more than 18 years and was the sole provider of health insurance for her family. “I had the shame and the guilt.”

But her teenagers surprised her with their optimism.

“They had seen me work so hard in the fashion industry. To them, it was like — you’re going to figure it out,” she says.

More than a year later, Mekki is still figuring it out. She is among millions of women who have yet to return to work full time, despite an economic recovery boosted by the availability of COVID-19 vaccines and falling rates of coronavirus infection.

Labor economists say it’s hard to point to any single reason why 1.8 million fewer women are in the labor force than before the coronavirus pandemic or why in a country that’s now facing labor shortages, so many women remain unemployed.

“I think it’s just a complex mix of factors,” says Stephanie Aaronson, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution. “Some of those could start to subside as the economy recovers, and jobs come back, and schools reopen, and the health situation improves.”

But a return to pre-pandemic levels could take a long time, in part because women tend to stick with the decisions they’ve made. A mother who decided to stay home with her children in the pandemic may end up out of the workforce for years, Aaronson says. “So I think that the recovery for female labor force participation could just be slow.”

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