The numbers are crushing: By the end of April last year, less than half of the women in Brazil were employed, the lowest level in 30 years. In Australia at about the same time, nearly one-10th of women exited the workforce, while in Japan, women lost jobs at nearly twice the rate of men.
In March, US Vice President Kamala Harris deemed the exodus a “national emergency,” with 3.5 million mothers of school-aged children in the country having left their jobs in March and April last year.
“You can’t be a prosperous country with half of your workforce sitting on the sidelines,” said Titan Alon, assistant professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego.
Illustration: Lance Liu
The forces driving the global purge of working women are strikingly similar from country to country: School shutdowns, daycare center closures, remote schooling and the ensuing juggle between employment and caregiving forced some parents to cut their hours or leave their jobs altogether. Women, who on average get paid less than men, ultimately bore the brunt — abandoning the workforce more frequently than their husbands. Factor in the reality that women were also more likely to work in industries hit harder by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the result is a once-in-a-century crisis.
“Because we lacked a care infrastructure heading in, everything was worse for women and women’s labor force participation,” said Wendy Chun-hoon, director of the Women’s Bureau at the US Department of Labor.
The childcare crisis has driven a workforce gender gap for decades. The pandemic — which some economists have dubbed the US’ first female recession — has made it undeniably worse.
Oxfam estimated that the pandemic cost women globally at least US$800 billion in lost income last year, “equivalent to more than the combined GDP of 98 countries.”
When it comes to economic growth, Bloomberg Economics research estimates that if labor force participation and education for women were on par with men by 2050, US$20 trillion — nearly the size of the US’ annual output — would be added to global GDP.
After ignoring the statistics, some countries are finally addressing their broken childcare systems.
Bloomberg examined seven economies to see what new policies — from the incremental to the experimental — have been put in place since the start of the pandemic and what is still being considered.
Australia
By Michael Heath
As women began dropping out of Australia’s workforce in April last year, the government surprised the country with a radical move: Childcare would be made free to all for about three months.
The temporary policy was meant to build a bridge to a post-pandemic economy, a particularly unexpected move coming from Australia’s conservative center-right government. Parents could maintain their spots at daycare centers, while keeping 200,000 childcare worker jobs intact.
It worked. Research found that the program helped support an eventual bounceback in women’s employment, because it kept many daycare centers from closing permanently, preventing supply issues later on.
By September last year, women’s labor force participation in Australia had rebounded stronger than that for men.
While the jobs and output lost last year were fully recouped early this year, a surge of the Delta strain of SARS-CoV-2 put about half the Australian population back in lockdown by last month.
This time around, though, there is no free childcare.
Early data show an outsized fallout among women. In New South Wales, where Sydney is, payroll jobs worked by women tumbled 5.3 percent in the first half of July compared with 3.5 percent for men.
In an effort to jumpstart a return to work for women, the Australian government announced additional spending in the May budget that would increase childcare subsidies for families — an average of A$2,260 (US$1,656) per year for a quarter of a million families.
Danielle Wood, chief executive officer at the Grattan Institute, an independent think tank in Melbourne, said that the new policy “does bring down some of those disincentives a bit for families, but it’s a long way from transformative.”
Canada
By Shelly Hagan
The pandemic’s toll on parents was the final push Canada’s government needed to finalize a nationwide childcare plan that first surfaced almost two decades ago.
In 2005, the country’s Liberal government had signed agreements with all 10 provinces to roll out a national childcare program, only to fall apart a year later when the Conservative government took over.
Earlier this year, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took advantage of the pandemic-induced political tailwinds to revive the Liberal plan. The government would invest up to C$30 billion (US$23.74 billion) over five years for childcare for all families, helping cover half the costs with provinces that sign on to the agreement.
The plan is largely modeled after Quebec’s subsidized childcare program, which launched more than two decades ago and has since enabled more women to engage in the province’s labor market.
Trudeau’s program would reduce childcare costs per child to an average of C$10 per day by increasing staff and openings for kids in regulated childcare centers.
So far, the government has signed agreements with seven of 10 provinces.
The effort risked crumbling again with the election this month, but the incumbent Liberals earned enough votes to form a stable government.
Canadian economist and research fellow at the Atkinson Foundation Armine Yalnizyan said that the new policy is critical.
“There won’t be a full recovery without a she-covery and there won’t be a she-covery without childcare,” Yalnizyan said.
United States
By Reade Pickert
Childcare in the US has long been a precarious patchwork of daycare centers, home-based providers, nannies and the family members willing to fill in the gaps. More than half of Americans live in childcare deserts or areas where there is more demand than supply, and it is often prohibitively expensive.
Looming over all of this is the knowledge that the US almost nationalized childcare 50 years ago. In 1971, the US Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, but then-US president Richard Nixon vetoed it, deriding it as “radical.”
Childcare advocates are hoping that the pandemic, which battered sectors with high female employment and led millions of women to leave the workforce, will be a turning point.
Congress’ nearly US$2 trillion stimulus package, which was passed in March, expanded the child tax credit and appropriated US$24 billion to help childcare providers. For millions of American families, that expansion meant monthly payments starting in the middle of July of up to US$300 per child.
However, the boost is temporary.
US President Joe Biden is now pushing to build longer-term infrastructure. He proposed the US$1.8 trillion American Families Plan, which includes provisions spanning from universal preschool to paid family leave and an extension of the child-tax credit expansion. It also calls to ensure that low and middle-income families spend no more than 7 percent of their income on childcare.
Democrats are still debating the contents of a US$3.5 trillion tax and spending package anticipated to pass through a process known as reconciliation. Voting is expected to fall along party lines, meaning Senate Democrats will have to get West Virginia’s Joe Manchin on board, but he has said that he will not support a package of that size.
After the US Department of the Treasury released a new report last week detailing the failures of the current childcare system, US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen put the need for change in stark terms.
“The free market works well in many different sectors, but childcare is not one of them,” Yellen said.
UK and Germany
By Lizzy Burden
and Carolynn Look
In the UK, where schools closed for months and childcare costs are among the highest in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development — accounting for almost 40 percent of the average salary earned during the pandemic — women disproportionately took unpaid time off.
Economists at Bristol University found that British women were 4 percentage points more likely to have lost their jobs during the pandemic than men, a gap widening to 10 percentage points for families with small children.
Despite the growing pressure for parental benefits like paid leave, the British Exchequer did not include any financial support for childcare in its most recent budget statement in March.
Instead, “the UK has set priorities for recovery heavily skewed towards male-dominated sectors such as construction, infrastructure and tech,” said Christina Palmou, an economist at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, a research group founded by the former British prime minister.
Meanwhile, in Germany, data collected by the German Institute of Labor Economics showed that during the early stages of the pandemic there was a “sizeable gender gap” in terms of time spent looking after children, but with a twist: Women were no more likely to lose their jobs.
Why?
The country already had what would be considered revolutionary in most places: An extensive furlough program subsidized by the government along with additional compensation for working parents.
The existing policy that enabled parents to have their salaries partially compensated if they missed up to 10 days of work to care for a sick child was expanded to cover school closures during the pandemic. The number of days parents could claim benefits annually increased to 30 per child and per parent — meaning that a couple with one child could get up to 90 percent of their net pay back for a combined 60 days of missed work.
While those policies helped women who were already in more stable employment, it still left more vulnerable workers exposed. Those same benefits do not apply to so-called “mini jobs” — positions that pay less than 450 euros (US$528) per month, common in hospitality and domestic work, industries hit particularly hard in the pandemic.
Brazil
By Augusta Victoria Saraiva and Maria Eloisa Capurro
In a region that still struggles with one of the widest gender gaps in labor force participation, the pandemic drove Brazil to a new historic low. Less than half of the country’s women remained employed — 46.3 percent in comparison to 65.5 percent of men — at the onset of the pandemic, the lowest number in three decades.
More than a quarter of the women who left the workforce last year said that they were doing so to take care of their families, Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) data showed.
Sixty-six percent of the women still out of work in the country say they cannot rejoin the labor force right away for the same reason, compared with only 7 percent of men, IADB economist Livia Gouvea Gomes said.
Latin America experienced the longest school closures in the world. Even in Sao Paulo, where schools began reopening in April, in-person capacity is limited to comply with social distancing measures. In addition to the 207,000 enrolled children still at home in South America’s largest city thanks to the partial closures, another 2,600 were not able to secure spots in public daycare centers as of March.
The Sao Paulo City Government has promised to create 50,000 more childcare spots in the next four years.
Meanwhile, mothers who have to keep their children at home get direct payments of about US$38 a month.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is seen as unlikely to enact any long-term childcare reforms. He has repeatedly defended child labor, once noting that he began working when he was 12.
A local investigation reported that his government has left one-third of the budget geared at women’s programs unused.
Japan
By Yuko Takeo
Japanese women were on an eight-year streak of increased labor force participation until COVID-19 hit. The rise had less to do with the culture’s shifting attitude toward working women than the stark reality that the country was faced with an aging and shrinking population in need of more workers.
While Japan was not thrust into extreme lockdowns, the consequences of the culture’s ingrained sexism still revealed itself.
Most of the millions of women who had joined the workforce in recent years opted for more flexible roles that could be adjusted around family needs — and it was those roles, particularly in the service sector, that were battered.
Roughly 700,000 women left the workforce in April last year, compared with 390,000 men.
Although schools have largely remained open, daycare centers and municipalities have requested that parents minimize their hours in order to limit the risks of spreading COVID-19, making it harder for parents to fully return to work.
Some people are even rethinking the prospect of children due to pandemic-related uncertainty and lacking availability of care.
Last year, the number of pregnancies reported to authorities fell 4.8 percent from 2019.
The Japanese government has given cash handouts to lower-income households with children and aims to get the number of preschool children who cannot secure a care facility spot to zero. As of April, that number had fallen to about 5,000 across the country.
However, that has not been enough to address a falling birthrate and now a shrinking female workforce.
To The Honorable Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜): We would like to extend our sincerest regards to you for representing Taiwan at the inauguration of US President Donald Trump on Monday. The Taiwanese-American community was delighted to see that Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan speaker not only received an invitation to attend the event, but successfully made the trip to the US. We sincerely hope that you took this rare opportunity to share Taiwan’s achievements in freedom, democracy and economic development with delegations from other countries. In recent years, Taiwan’s economic growth and world-leading technology industry have been a source of pride for Taiwanese-Americans.
Next week, the nation is to celebrate the Lunar New Year break. Unfortunately, cold winds are a-blowing, literally and figuratively. The Central Weather Administration has warned of an approaching cold air mass, while obstinate winds of chaos eddy around the Legislative Yuan. English theologian Thomas Fuller optimistically pointed out in 1650 that “it’s always darkest before the dawn.” We could paraphrase by saying the coldest days are just before the renewed hope of spring. However, one must temper any optimism about the damage being done in the legislature by the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), under
To our readers: Due to the Lunar New Year holiday, from Sunday, Jan. 26, through Sunday, Feb. 2, the Taipei Times will have a reduced format without our regular editorials and opinion pieces. From Tuesday to Saturday the paper will not be delivered to subscribers, but will be available for purchase at convenience stores. Subscribers will receive the editions they missed once normal distribution resumes on Sunday, Feb. 2. The paper returns to its usual format on Monday, Feb. 3, when our regular editorials and opinion pieces will also be resumed.
Young Taiwanese are consuming an increasing amount of Chinese content on TikTok, causing them to have more favorable views of China, a Financial Times report cited Taiwanese social scientists and politicians as saying. Taiwanese are being exposed to disinformation of a political nature from China, even when using TikTok to view entertainment-related content, the article published on Friday last week said. Fewer young people identify as “Taiwanese” (as opposed to “Chinese”) compared with past years, it wrote, citing the results of a survey last year by the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation. Nevertheless, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) would be hard-pressed
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