Tag: women of color

Multiple Jobholding Among Women In the Pandemic Economy

To follow up on last week’s post showing how women are still more likely to be working multiple jobs than men (both among the employed and among their total populations), here’s a reminder that not all women are the same. Let’s look at multiple jobholders as a share of employed, across race and age categories.

Black women are substantially more likely to hold multiple jobs than any other race categories of women. Notably, while multiple jobholding fell for all groups in the spring when unemployment peaked (and number of overall jobs in the economy cratered), multiple jobholding as share of employed has already (as of September) returned to a “normal” level for Black women but not for other women.
By age categories, the youngest of working women (ages 20-24) have always been the most likely to hold multiple jobs, because they are most likely to have to piece together multiple part-time jobs (often in the leisure/hospitality sector) to make a living. These women were most likely to lose at least one of their multiple jobs at the start of the pandemic, and regain work as businesses reopened in the summer.

There are many factors that could explain the differences by race, probably most significantly that Black women are more likely to be sole earners in their households (as well as single parents) yet also more likely to earn lower hourly wages. The different trends by age reflect that multiple part-time jobs are often the closest a young adult (even a college-educated one) can come to a full-time job–and that the human-service-intensive jobs many young women work in were the ones that disappeared the most at the start of the pandemic and have not and will not likely fully come back even when the public health crisis eventually wanes. The Pandemic Recession — or “She-cession”– has not just been hard on women because of the severity of the lowest depths of job loss experienced, but because it’s really “jerked around” the women who were already the most economically vulnerable.