The First-Ever “She-Cession”

Women & minorities have been impacted disproportionately by the COVID pandemic of 2020. How will we recover what we’ve lost?

Amanda Warton Jenkins
Well Woman
Published in
12 min readMay 12, 2021

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Women are strong, resilient, and adaptable. But over the past year or so, the COVID-19 pandemic has tested us beyond our limits. One thing is for sure, its long-term effects on women are myriad, and we’re probably just scratching the surface. I decided to compile some of the statistics that show just how much ground women and minorities will be forced to make up when the dust clears.

The most horrifying statistic so far? It’s still that COVID-19 death rates are significantly higher among Black American women. The analysis by Harvard’s GenderSci Lab found that COVID death rates among Black women are nearly four times higher than those for white men; three times higher than for Asian men; and also higher than for white and Asian women. The findings were published April 5 in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

Next most troubling: the December 2020 jobs report. A National Women’s Law Center analysis showed that not only did the U.S. workforce lose 140,000 jobs in December, but women lost a net 156,000 jobs, while men gained a net 16,000. In other words, women accounted for 100% of the lost jobs that month.

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Amanda Warton Jenkins
Well Woman

Yoga teacher, MPP UChicago "rewilding," living from the neck down, cultivating Albert Einstein's "sacred gift," intuition. My book: https://amzn.to/3mTwXlZ