How post-pandemic precarity altered the job landscape for Canadian women
"I think we're gonna look back on 2021 and 2022 as really pivotal and unique years in the labor market,” says the author of a new CCPA report.
Tl;dr
A new report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives shows that while job numbers for women have largely recovered from the pandemic, the overall quality of working conditions has diminished.
Owing to major changes in the job market, including high retirement rates, a large influx of newcomers and burnout among health-care workers, women with the right educational attainment were able to obtain better-paying jobs.
This development, however, created a major “chasm,” according to the report’s author, with those who stayed in the same jobs they had prior to the pandemic facing “much more strenuous, precarious circumstances [while] getting hammered by the current cost of living crisis.”
Women who successfully obtained better-paying employment filled roles on the lower end of the pay scale within those fields, maintaining the gender pay gap.
With few exceptions, the financial stability of Canadian working women has yet to recover from before the Covid pandemic, according to a new report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).
“The Covid-19 pandemic wiped out 35 years of women’s economic gains in two short months,” the May 8 report, entitled Work in Progress: Women in Canada’s changing post-pandemic labour market, says at its outset.
As a result of the initial pandemic lockdowns, women’s employment fell to 54% from a high of 58.5% in 2019. Although the rate reached 58% in 2022, the most recent year for which job market data is available, this apparent recovery doesn’t tell the entire story, the report’s author told The Orchard.
Senior CCPA researcher Katherine Scott wrote a report last year focusing on the pandemic’s broader impact on gender inequality. For this one, she decided to focus on the job market exclusively.
“I think we're gonna look back on 2021 and 2022 as really pivotal and unique years in the labor market,” Scott told The Orchard.
In that timespan, Canada welcomed more than a million newcomers, Boomers continued retiring and “stressed, burnt out, maxed out” health-care workers looked for work elsewhere.
Those who were “in the right place with the right education … were able to pivot” into higher paying jobs, she explained.
But this effect created a “chasm,” with those remaining in low-paying jobs facing “much more strenuous, precarious circumstances [while] getting hammered by the current cost of living crisis.”
In 2021, 54% of women worked in low-paying jobs characterized by five Cs—caring, clerical, cashiering, cleaning and catering—a figure which has only decreased by five percentage points since 1987, the report notes.
The number of men working these jobs has been even more persistent, with 19% in 2021 representing just three percentage points more than in 1987, which Scott argues poses a barrier to eliminating Canada’s gender pay gap.
The report found that the number of women employed in sectors most impacted by public health restrictions, including retail, entertainment, accommodations and food services, remains 98,000 less than prior to the pandemic.
These jobs represented almost half of total job losses in the first two months of the pandemic, but 56% of female job losses. The proportion of women working in these fields decreased by 2.6 percentage points from 2019 to 2022, compared to 1.5 percentage points for men.
Many of the jobs that have since opened up are far more precarious than before—particularly for newcomers—with an increasing reliance on temporary foreign workers and part-time employment driving down wages and working conditions.
“The pandemic really ripped open how precariously patched together our caring services are and how we've been loath to really make the investments needed to improve working conditions and wages.”
Jobs in the care economy—education, health care and social assistance—have largely rebounded from the early Covid crash, when 83% of those who lost jobs were women, but they haven’t kept up with increased demand and remain constrained by decades of government austerity.
The child-care sector in particular remained 20,000 jobs short of 2019 employment figures in 2022, with women accounting for “all these employment losses,” the report says.
“The pandemic really ripped open how precariously patched together our caring services are and how we've been loath to really make the investments needed to improve working conditions and wages,” Scott said.
Women working in fields that were largely insulated from pandemic disruption, such as professional services, public administration, information and cultural services, and finance and insurance, appeared on the surface to benefit from strong employment growth in 2021 and 2022.
But Scott notes that many of the gains women made in these workplaces occurred on the lower end of the pay scale, pushing the gender pay gap in these fields upwards.
So while the representation of women in professional services, including computer systems design, legal services and accounting, increased by 1.5% from 2019 to 2022, the amount women in these fields made compared to their male colleagues decreased by three cents on the dollar.
“This is the definition of two steps forward, one step back. Lower employment rates, fewer working hours per week, substantial labour market segregation and persistent glass ceilings mean that women are still being paid considerably less than men,” Scott writes in the report.
She told The Orchard that a close look at these numbers suggests economic “inequality is becoming more entrenched.”
“Aren’t we all regretting that we weren’t able to focus on what was important and really focus on building back better? Because that moment seems to have passed,” said Scott.
Read the full report here.
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