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Women in the Workforce
The Pandemic Revealed Painful Truths But Opened New Doors
Three years have gone by. Three years since the pandemic hit all of us in ways unimaginable at the time. In the early days of March 2020, there was so much fear. Fear of going outside, fear of being within six feet of anyone else, fear of groceries.
Fear of catching Covid. And dying on a ventilator alone in some godforsaken hospital. Not the way any of us wanted to leave earth.
Little by little fear gave way to managing our lives one moment, one day, one week at a time. We adjusted to the realities of daily living with masks, remote work, Teams and Zoom, remote schooling, Google classrooms, and remote caregiving.
It now feels like a blur, the general population happier that we’re on the backside of a pandemic — but in some ways we are still none the wiser for it. One particularly painful truth has to do with the state of women in the workforce.
During the pandemic 3 million women left the workforce. They quit for multifaceted reasons: childcare or lack of it, kids learning at home, stress, layoffs, Covid or long Covid, the great resignation, the impossibility of dealing with macro and micro aggressions on a daily and weekly basis, and more.
