WORKPLACE
Since opening her home day care more than 20 years ago , Charlotte Neal took her first holiday break last December . She needed those two weeks to rest and reset , and she ’ d earned it .
Neal owns and operates Charlotte ’ s Family Daycare out of her Sacramento house with a small staff . Her first child arrives at 4 a . m . and the last leaves at midnight . She ’ s open six days a week , but with prepping and cleaning , she ends up working Sundays too . She loves her work but admits it ’ s an exhausting schedule .
“ You have to take a break for yourself ,” she says . “ As women , we give our all . Even when we don ’ t have any more , we ’ re still giving . But we have to save some for ourselves .”
Since February 2020 , women nationwide have seen a net job loss of more than 1.8 million , according to analysis released in January from the National Women ’ s Law Center based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics . The same analysis stated that in January , 27 times more men than women joined the labor force .
Sacramento Vice Mayor Angelique Ashby highlighted those numbers in a tweet , saying they reveal ongoing inequalities at work .
“ Hear me out on this … we can pretend that men and women have been equally impacted by the pandemic or we can face the truth ,” she tweeted Feb . 4 , when the NWLC numbers were released . “ Women lack equal representation and equal opportunity . Hard Stop .”
It ’ s a lesson Neal and many others have learned during the pandemic : Women ’ s lives are so much more than their careers — even those who love what they do . Months of isolation , health concerns and widespread loss have been jarring experiences . There ’ s an added emotional weight for those who care for children or elders , difficult and delicate work that largely falls on women . But the last two years have also opened up space for women to reassess the role of work in their lives . As many faced changes in their jobs , they were able to shift the priorities and persist with the support of their families , colleagues and communities .
Getting to our pre-pandemic state
At the start of 2020 , California boasted a 4.2 percent unemployment rate . This followed decades of women making headway in the labor force . Since the 1960s , federal policies that banned sex-based wage discrimination and pregnancy discrimination made these gains possible .
“ As much as I love being a female business owner in Sacramento , I have to be a mother first .”
SABRINA BERHANE Owner , Tiferet Coffee Shop
“ Women ’ s lives were really materially improved over those decades ,” says Jessica Mason , a Washington , D . C . -based senior policy analyst for the National Partnership for Women & Families . “ There really had been tremendous progress made in the 20th century in terms of women ’ s equality overall and gender equity and economic participation .”
In the 1960s , the women ’ s participation rate in the labor force hovered around 38 percent , Mason says . That number peaked in 1999 at 60 percent and has steadily declined since then . In 2019 , 57 percent of women were working . In a 2017 report , the U . S . Bureau of Labor Statistics projected that number would continue to decline . Of course , it didn ’ t factor in the impact of a pandemic .
Last September , 309,000 women ages 20 and older left the workforce entirely , meaning they ’ re not looking for work . That same month , women lost 26,000 jobs while men gained 220,000 , according to the National Women ’ s Law Center .
Leading up to the pandemic , another indicator of economic equality showed some promise : the wage gap . In the 1960s , white women made around 58 cents for every dollar a white man earned for the same work . Due in part to the Equal Pay Act of 1963 , the gap narrowed , and on average women earn about 82 cents for every dollar a man makes . But that progress has been uneven . Today , Black women and Latinas earned 63 percent and 57 percent , respectively , of what a white man earns , according to organizations including Equal Pay Today and the American Association of University Women .
“ Women of color have been hit on two or three fronts ,” Mason says . “ Being overrepresented in jobs that were laid off at the beginning of the pandemic … and then also represented in those frontline jobs ” where they were at risk of contracting COVID-19 .
The child care provider
Neal has long related to the struggles that her day care families face : long hours and low pay . In 2019 , the median hourly wage for child care workers was $ 13.43 in California — just above minimum wage . Her day care serves families who qualify for subsidized care . She took the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ’ s safety protocols seriously and costs climbed as she went through cleaning supplies quickly . She credits Child Care Providers United , her union , with getting hard-to-find personal protective equipment into the hands of providers and helping them get paid .
Like California public schools , subsidized day care is paid by the state based on in-person attendance , which in Neal ’ s case dropped from its maximum
74 comstocksmag . com | March 2022