- Hi, I'm Christy McDonald.

And here's what's coming up this week on One Detroit.

- [Narrator] Women, work, and the pandemic.

The crisis of women leaving the workplace, why it's happening, the effect on the economy and families.

And looking for solutions with more flexibility jobs and help for caregiving.

It's a One Detroit Special Report.

Join us this week.

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(upbeat music) - We've seen women who've had to actually voluntarily leave jobs.

And then we've seen the other women just really struggling to hang on.

- I was really upset that they wouldn't let us go home and work.

And I was just, that I felt like we just were being punished because we had a kid is how I felt.

- Our moms need to be in a room and holding conversations and driving how all of this change looks like.

- Yeah, the conversations can't be happening about them someplace.

- No, no.

- Will those jobs come back?

For women usually it's never at the same level that it was.

- There are know decisions being made not focused on what caregivers need.

And that's the way our workplace rules have been set up.

- All things we've heard over the past year when it comes to women, work, the pandemic and taking care of it all.

Hi, and welcome to One Detroit, I'm Christy McDonald.

I am so glad that you're with me.

This week, the show will be a little bit different and it's something I've been thinking about since I saw an editorial cartoon in the Detroit Free Press a few months ago, take a look.

The 500 hats of American women during the pandemic.

Sure, it would be funny.

If it weren't so devastatingly spot on.

The numbers are real.

COVID has hit women the hardest.

Over two million have left the workforce.

And the number of women in the workforce has dropped to 57%, the lowest since 1988.

And while both men and women lost jobs because of the pandemic, men have recovered, women have not.

The factors are many, caregiving.

They've been downsized or cut because their jobs were the first to go in the pandemic or inflexible workplaces.

We have all had a heck of a year trying to make things work the best we can.

Honestly, I was a caregiver for my husband who had cancer.

I was lucky enough to still be able to have this job and be flexible enough to help three children at home with online school.

It hasn't been easy for anyone.

But that's why we're going to explore what the economic impact of the stress on women in 2021 during this pandemic will be for all of us and what the solutions.

Whether they're policies and workplace changes can be made to make a difference in our lives.

I put out a call on Facebook for women to share their stories.

And Lauren Maroney volunteered.

She lives in Madison Heights, is married, has a super cute six-year-old named Jamison.

- This is Jamison.

- Hey Jamison, how are you?

She got to work from home during COVID but her employer in August said it was time to get back to the office.

With school shut down that left Jamison in Zoom kindergarten at home.

- If the school is not open, I don't necessarily have somebody that can just come to my house and watch them all our family works.

So we needed childcare.

(laughs) I was really upset that they wouldn't let us go home and work.

And I was just, that I felt like we just were being punished 'cause we had a kid is how I felt.

I've never been unemployed like that where I've had to ever collect unemployment or try to collect unemployment.

And I was, I was really scared.

- [Narrator] Lauren is one of the 865,000 women who dropped out of the U.S. workforce from August to September 2020 alone.

Dr. Betsy Stevenson is a Labor Economist at the university of Michigan.

- What I was concerned about back last spring.

And we saw really come out was that these women who were trying to work from home or being laid off, were dealing with kids who were at home.

And we saw a lot of women going all the way back to last summer, who just couldn't go back to their jobs even when they were recalled because they had kids at home.

And we've seen women who've had to actually voluntarily leave jobs.

And then we've seen the other women just really struggling to hang on.

And so I don't even think the pace of job loss in job leaving for women is over.

- So what are the numbers that we're looking at right now?

Millions of women who have left the workforce?

Or what are the most current numbers that we have?

- Well, the most current number is that we have nine and a half million fewer jobs today than we had at the start of the pandemic.

And there're women represent a slightly disproportionate share of those jobs.

- [Narrator] According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics, there were 2.2 million fewer women in the workforce in October, 2020 than in October, 2019.

Women participating in the workforce has dropped to 57%, the lowest level since 1988.

- Let's talk a little bit about that.

When we think about how far women had come in terms of equality in the workplace or closing the wage gap, being able to be picked for jobs up and higher management CEOs.

- Well, let's start with sort of glass half full perspective, which is that women have really been in ascendancy in the labor force.

And so we went in to the pandemic with the highest labor force participation rate of women with young children ever.

They had more work experience than they had had in the past, and they had more education and skills than they had in the past.

And there's another thing that we're layering on to all of that, which is women had started to reclaim their fertility.

So you have these women in their mid 40s who have more kids than the generation before them had, more work experience and are more committed to staying in the labor force.

And yet all those kids they had now have nowhere to go.

They have no childcare, they have no schooling.

And that has created this big national crisis that's getting so much attention.

We need this attention on it because it was really at a breaking point.

We can't have women have more education than men, as much work experience as men, as committed to work life as men and households being as formed by two working adults and have the workplace policies that we have that were designed when there was always a stay-at-home spouse.

We need paid leave.

We need some workplace flexibility.

We really need to rethink our approach to work and family.

- [Narrator] According to the recently released 2020 Women in the Workplace study by McKinsey and leanin.org, women are feeling more exhausted, burned out and under pressure during the pandemic.

40% of mothers compared to 27% of fathers have added three or more additional hours of caregiving a day to their schedule.

And one in four women are now considering leaving the workplace or downshifting their careers.

- This past year hurt women so much in so many different ways, so it's number one, that women make up the disproportionate amount of service workers who lost their jobs in this economy and then the public sector jobs in this economy.

- [Narrator] Julie Kashen is the director of women's economic justice at The Century Foundation.

- Especially women of color, who are the essential workers who've been going to work every day without having child care or school for their kids.

And so women have really been struggling during this time.

And the fact that we've never built a care infrastructure before COVID started has really caused a lot of that problem.

A study that I did with Sarah Jane Glynn from the Center for American Progress and Amanda Novela from the Century Foundation found that we're at risk of losing about $64.5 billion on aggregate of women's lost wages from women having to cut back their work hours or leaving their jobs to provide caregiving.

That's about the size of the GDP of West Virginia or New Hampshire.

So we will lose an entire economic activity of a state if we don't solve this problem.

- But when we see women maybe even going back into the workforce, they're not even probably going to be making the same amount of money that they made when they came back or they can't go back into that same position.

- So basically unequal pay means that women already were behind before this started, women of color were behind even more and caregiving is a huge part of that.

Discrimination in general is a huge part of that, occupational segregation is a huge part of that.

And to your point, when women come back to work, they may not be able to get back to even where they had gotten before and that might have already started and an unequal place.

So we have a lot of work to do.

- [Narrator] Here in Michigan, White women make 78 cents on the dollar compared to men.

Black women make 65 cents, Latina women, even less at 57 cents.

- Analysts say it may be 2024 before employment for women returns to pre pandemic rates.

So how do we stop job loss?

Shore up childcare and get workplaces to embrace flexibility?

- I think this is absolutely the time that we're gonna see real action.

Caregiving, paid leave are really essential and I think that this is now the moment and time when we're going to have to make those changes, because it really what we've seen is that women are essential to our labor force.

And without childcare, we don't get the women that we've trained, that we've invested in, we're not able to keep them attached to the labor force and they're not able to make the progress in their careers that they deserve to make, given how much they've accomplished.

- We are already seeing some progress, so the American rescue plan included the $40 billion to get us to the $50 billion that child care advocates, parents and other experts have been calling for for the last year.

So this is money that will help stabilize the child care sector.

And we still then have more work to do to build back and build an actual child care system.

- Can you go-- - [Narrator] For Lauren, it will have to come down to changing her job to meet the needs of her family not necessarily her career path.

- I think when I go back into the work, try go back to the workforce, what I would like to maybe do is try and maybe get a job if I can.

School districts.

So maybe that would be better to line up with breaks and things like that.

Or maybe I find a job that's a little bit more either a permanent work from home job.

So it doesn't matter if schools get shut down again.

It doesn't matter.

I will still be able to work from home.

Maybe I have to shift what my priority is and maybe it's not gonna necessarily be about the pay scale and what you're doing and maybe more about the hours and how conducive is this if something like this happened again, 'cause I don't wanna do this again.

When I go back, I wanna work for, I wanna make it very clear that I'm working for a company or a boss that is sympathetic to something like this.

And I'm not gonna have to lose another job because you're just not, you just want, you're looking at your bottom line and that what everybody else in the world is going through.

- Lauren will be looking this summer, as long as she feels confident schools will be back in person this fall.

And it's that changing schooling piece that puts women especially in a tough place.

So I reached out to Bernita Bradley.

She is a time educational advocate for Detroit parents through her business "The Village."

She's been helping connect parents to resources to homeschool their kids during the pandemic.

- It's been one of those years where it seems like a setback for a lot of parents, right?

A lot of moms specifically because moms are usually the first person to have to stay at home with the children, right?

And with children not being in school, they've taken on two roles now or maybe three.

Right now, they're the work at home if they have the privilege to work at home, 'cause that's a whole different story, right?

So they're the mom on a computer at home trying to navigate their own workspace.

They're the mom who's trying to make sure that their children are engaged in education and engaged in learning, and they're also the mom who's trying to figure out the social emotional needs of the household in a totally different way to the pandemic, right.

And worried about if their jobs are even gonna exist when things reopen and a lot of parents have lost their jobs.

A lot of moms are figuring it out, right?

We've seen mom groups form.

We've seen support groups online, like they're touching base to say, "Hey, what are you doing?

"What are you doing?"

- Yeah, and I love how you said that they're making it work.

It's because you have to.

I mean, what is the alternative when you have your kids at home and if you have lost your job you've got to make it work from day to day.

You've been really instrumental in helping people understand how to do the home schooling and get some of those resources and support.

Bernita, what are some of the stressors that women are going through that maybe we don't even see on the surface?

- Yeah, I think as far as education go, people, parents and mothers are seeing for the first time what their kids were experiencing in school, even though this is endemic learning, right?

This is not traditional learning for even homeschool families, but they're seeing this side of where the children gaps are in literacy skills, where their math gaps are, and parents are literally becoming tutors and reaching out for support like online, saying, "Hey, my child struggling in math, "how can I get my child on point "well, I don't understand this portion of their math?

"Can you help my child in math?

"I can help your child in science "or I can help your child in English, right?"

And those supports coming in way of even like the bringing Detroit's the Detroit College Access Network.

We've partnered with MSU School of Music.

Like all these beautiful partnerships we've even partnered outside of the state, we've partnered with Rock by Rock to just make sure that families have hopefully a classroom within their home, right?

- I like how you pointed out all of the various programs and the connections that people now have access to.

And maybe the parents who are saying, "Hey, I need help with this or how can I help with this?"

I'm worried about the people who haven't been able to do that.

How many people are out there who feel completely lost?

- So for the families who feel like they're lost, it has been hard.

We have more eviction notices.

We have more families who have cuddled up together to live together because families couldn't do it during the pandemic, whereas one person is like working and the other person is like, "Well, look, I lost my job, "so can I move in with you?"

And it's actually a support for one another.

But it's catastrophic also 'cause not every family is considered homeless, right?

And then mom's trying to think like, how do I get back on my feet?

- What needs to happen in terms of education for our kids and opportunity for our parents and for our mothers to maybe be able to offload some of that caregiving and educational help?

- We need to be looking, I should say, not necessarily looking for in the next six months, but listening, we really need to be listening to our Havasupai citizens.

We need to be inviting them to the table to create how work opens for people like employment, offices really need to be talking to employers and saying, "Hmm, we have all these moms who have kids who are working.

"We need to switch their shifts, right?"

Like make their shifts more sustainable for their lifestyle right now.

We need to have conversations about education, how to schooling look.

What are the schools gonna provide for children to make it easier for parents?

And again, those parents that we talk about need to be in a room.

Our moms need to be in a room holding conversations and driving how all of this change looks like.

- Yeah, the conversations can't be happening about them someplace.

- No, no, and if we're not doing that, we going to end up back at row one and moms are going to be stay-at-home moms who cannot afford a lifestyle.

- So does this leave us?

In 2021, is there finally an appetite to change perceptions of women with policies, with more women in public office reflect that desire?

For that conversation I met up with two journalists I admire greatly, Kat Stafford, she's a national investigative writer for The Associated Press and focuses on race and ethnicity.

And Nancy Kaffer, columnist with the Detroit Free Press.

Kat, let me start with you first.

When we just look back at this entire year and the impact it's had on women, what kinda runs through your mind?

- Yeah, so for me since I cover the intersection of race and politics as so many other things, I'm always thinking about how our marginalized communities is really being impacted.

And I would say, just broadly speaking for all women it's been really hard.

I mean, we've been hit hard in terms of job loss.

We have been hit hard in terms of losing spouses and family members to COVID.

So it's just being really heartbreaking to hear some of these stories of families that are struggling because women are out of work.

They're unable to take care of their children.

- Obviously thinking about all the stuff Kat talked about, but also how it filters through my lens.

And a lot of times I try to step away from that and bring other people's perspective to the fore.

But this is one of the first times in my career where what I'm going through has been the best part of the big story.

And I gauge it as if I have all kinds of privilege.

I professional privilege, class privilege, economic privilege, racial privilege.

And it's been this hard for me.

And I look at like how that must mean, like canvasing marginalized women who are out of work, who have lost family members who are simply see no path to return to work in the near future because so many schools are still closed, places are not open.

- When we look at covering the stories and telling certain stories, are we on the right path?

- Well, I mean, if I can be frank, I think the media, we can always do better.

We can always do more.

One of the things that I'm actually thinking about is not just the personal impact on these women of them being out of work but what is the actual world, the world impact but we don't have women in these spaces of employment.

The perspectives that we bring, these are very important things that are lacking right now.

So I think that we are just really seeing the tip of an iceberg as this really starts to unfold, the true impact of being out of work of the amount of pressure that women are facing with being the primary things in their homes, responsible for their children, for their schooling.

I mean, that's a lot of pressure and I don't think yet that we've had enough of a robust discussion about what this all really is.

- I think any any parent who wants to be a stay-at-home parent should have that ability, but a lot of times women who don't wanna leave the workforce are pushed to because it make financial sense in the short-term to stay in a workforce with children.

But in the long-term, it's a disastrous choice.

It reduces a woman's earning potential, her ability to come back to the office, her stability of her marriage is bad and she needs to be able to leave.

And that was all before the pandemic where we're at now and coming out of this, like Kat said we haven't even really begun to talk about how this is gonna play out.

And like you, I'm extremely concerned about when we lose women's voices in these spaces.

- Kat, do you think that women, women of color, women across the board feel more empowered to speak out now in 2021 than they have in the past?

- I think in many ways, yes.

And I think it's because this past year was something that all of us, I think we have realized with something that we've never experienced and probably will hopefully never experience again.

And what that has done is we were in the midst of a still are what I call these three crises, right?

You had the pandemic, the economic fallout of the pandemic.

Also, let's be clear that the racial justice movement which has impacted so many.

And I think that you've seen so much that when you have been impacted personally that a lot of people are saying, "I don't speak out now, when will I?"

I think that what's also really important about this whole discussion is the role that sexism and in many regards racism plays in that.

And when you talk about women of color, black women in particular, it's this very unique intersection of racism and sexism, which we call massage memoir, right?

Which is something very uniquely that black women face.

And I think that that has also manifest it in a way where we are seeing so many of us exiting workplaces.

And so a lot of my coverage has really centered on finding those voices on the ground to really show and give light to other Americans who have been unaware or have frankly just willingly stuck their heads in the sand in regards to the plight of many women of color.

So I've just spent this past year really trying to amplify those voices in a way that wasn't expected and wasn't harmful.

And I hope that what came out the end of it was the new enlightening of how this has been the reality for many people in this country since its inception.

- I think a lot of us, a lot of women who consider themselves feminists in the last decade have learned a lot more about intersectional feminism and how the conjunction of race and gender and other identities exacerbates sexism and the discrimination against women that goes along with it.

I mean, I think our position was always a little more precarious and a lot of us wanted to acknowledge.

And the pandemic has really brought that out.

Again, the disparity in domestic work, the ways in which we are pushed to exit or not join the workforce.

And then the fact that a lot of women hold jobs that aren't prioritized as being important.

- So looking forward, what do you wanna write about, what are you looking at covering in the next six to 10 months when it comes to this?

- Last year marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment right, which has got the right to vote.

And a lot of people that I spoke with, noted that it was a bittersweet moment to mark because for many women of color in this country, we did not have that, right?

Right, and so when you have this conversation about all these issues, we have to realize that for a lot of women of color, black women and others, a lot of these rights, we did not receive until much, much later.

So the question is, how can they unite around these issues in a way that uplifts us off?

- I think we really have to start unwinding that damage to what's happened to our kids over the last year.

But I look forward to hopefully seeing some big policy changes coming forward, paid sick leave, a maternity leave, child care stuff.

I think there is an option.

And I think there is energy around this issue.

And I hope that I can advocate for positive changes that are gonna benefit all women.

And like Kat, we do have different levels of harm that we have to deal with as women, but I hope to find places where we can come together and recognize what does unite us and how we can push for change that helps every one of us.

- Thanks to Nancy and to Kat and to all of you for joining me.

Here at One Detroit, we'll continue to have conversations about the issues and policies that are impacting all of our lives.

Tell us what you think.

Just head to onederoitpbs.org and find us on social media at One Detroit.

I will see you next week, take care.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] You can find more at onedetroitpbs.org or subscribe to our social media channels and sign up for our One Detroit newsletter.

- [Narrator] From Delta Faucets to Behr Paint.

Masco Corporation is proud to deliver products that enhance the way consumers all over the world, experience and enjoy their living spaces.

Masco, serving Michigan Communities since 1929.

- [Narrator] Support for this program provided by the Cynthia & Edsel Ford Fund for Journalism at Detroit Public TV, The Kresge Foundation, Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan.

- [Narrator] The DTE Foundation is a proud sponsor of Detroit Public TV, among the state's largest foundations committed to Michigan focused giving.

We support organizations that are doing exceptional work in our state.

Visit DTEFoundation.com to learn more.

- [Narrator] Business leaders for Michigan.

Dedicated to making Michigan a top 10 state for jobs, personal income, and a healthy economy.

Also brought to you by and Viewers Like You.

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