A recent report from Statistics Canada shows that the COVID-19 pandemic has had more impact on women than men when it comes to job losses.
From March 2020 to February 2021, women accounted for 53.7 per cent of year-over-year employment losses.
Overall, Canada had lost 503,100 jobs, or 2.6 percent below pre-pandemic levels in February 2020.
What does this mean for Canada’s prospects of recovery? And how can we mitigate the impacts of this “she-cession” moving forward to ensure that women are not left behind?
Alicja Siekierska, senior reporter for Yahoo Finance Canada, and Sean Speer, editor at large for The Hub, discuss the reasons behind this disparity and whether or not any specific policy prescriptions will help get women back into the labour force.
Speer explains that this impact on women is in part owing to the sectors that they are employed in. The services sector (excluding public administration), which represented 89.9 percent of employment among women, was hit much harder by the lockdowns than the goods sector.
But while the impacts of the pandemic may look bleak in the short term and women still need support such as access to child care and mentorship to overcome remaining barriers, Speer is optimistic on the prospects of female labour force participation. He notes that over the past decade in Canada, women are outperforming men in post-secondary generally, and in many key programs, including law and medicine.
“I think that the story here is really positive, and we’re going to see a future in which the range of opportunities available to women are quite significant.”
Listen to the full discussion here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/crisis-management/id1519423585
