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Research Making the News

Single Mothers Hit Hard by Job Losses

│Tim Henderson│May 26, 2020

In a pandemic, single mothers must shoulder all the responsibilities at home — educating schoolchildren, caring for aging parents, cooking, cleaning, and household management. Now single moms have been hit particularly hard by the unemployment crisis, losing jobs at a far higher rate than other families with children, according to a Stateline analysis of census microdata provided by the University of Minnesota. In April, the number of single mothers with jobs was 22% lower than it was a year ago, compared with a 9% employment decline for other families with children, according to the analysis. The hit was even harder for low-wage single moms: Eighty-three percent working as waitresses lost their jobs by mid-April, along with 72% of those working as cleaners, 58% of cooks, a third of personal care aides and 14% of customer service representatives, according to the analysis. Before the pandemic hit, women held 58% of service jobs. By mid-April, with travel halted and restaurants shuttered, nearly 5.7 million women had lost those jobs, compared with 3.2 million men.

Citing: Holding Up Half the Sky: Mothers as Workers, Primary Caregivers, & Breadwinners During COVID-19 by Elyse Shaw; C. Nicole Mason, PhD; with Valerie Lacarte, PhD; Erika Jauregui at Institute for Women’s Policy Research

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Working mothers interrupted more often than fathers in lockdown – study

│Alexandra Topping│May 27, 2020

The April jobs represent an abrupt, disappointing reversal from a major milestone in December, when women held more payroll jobs than men for the first time in about a decade. Women “were making some real gains,” Jasmine Tucker, a researcher at the law center, said. “Now there’s this huge step back.” According to the N.W.L.C. analysis, this crisis has in one month wiped out all of the job gains that women had made in the past decade. But female-dominated jobs, like hospitality or child care, tend to also be underpaid and undervalued, which means that many of the newly unemployed women now have less of a financial cushion to fall back on, said Mason, of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. The problem is compounded for single mothers; a third of single mothers were already living below the poverty line and, since February, a million of them have lost their jobs.

Citing: Parents, especially mothers, paying heavy price for lockdown by Alison Andrew, Sarah Cattan, Monica Costa Dias, Christine Farquharson, Lucy Kraftman, Sonya Krutikova, Angus Phimister, and Almudena Sevilla at The Institute for Fiscal Studies



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Work-from-home not a choice for poor, less educated

│Surbhi Bhatia│March 21, 2020

Less educated and low-income workers are far less likely to be in jobs that allow them the work-from-home (WFH) or social-distancing options, and hence are more vulnerable during the covid-19 lockdowns, a US study suggests. The share of workers without a college degree was 38 percentage points more in jobs without the work-from-home option than other jobs, the working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) shows. Simon Mongey of the University of Chicago and others used data from the Occupational Information Network and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics to study demographics for such flexibilities at work. Gender, birthplace, marital status, access to health insurance and home ownership also determine how likely a worker is to be in a work-from-home job, the study finds. Legal, financial and management services were found to have the option more easily, but construction and healthcare jobs required on-site presence.

Citing: Which Workers Bear the Burden of Social Distancing Policies? By Simon Mongey, Laura Pilossoph and Alex Weinberg at National Bureau of Economic Research

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America’s essential workers are under-protected in the face of covid-19

│May 14, 2020

Nearly one in four American workers are employed in services. Many forced to stay at home because of the covid-19 pandemic—including restaurant and retail workers—have since been laid off or had their hours cut. But those deemed “essential” by government authorities—such as supermarket cashiers, delivery workers and pharmacists—have continued to work, risking exposure to the coronavirus. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued guidance on what firms can do to protect their employees. Such measures include checking temperatures, providing sanitising facilities and masks, and enforcing social distancing. But the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the agency responsible for ensuring that workplaces are safe, has mostly left employers to their own devices. As a result, the extent to which workers are shielded from infection has varied widely.

Citing: Essential and Unprotected COVID-19-Related Health and Safety Procedures for Service-Sector Workers at SHIFT at the University of California at Berkeley

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One in Five College Students is a Parent: 40% of Them Feel Isolated on Campus

│May 13, 2020

A new report released by nonprofit Generation Hope identifies gaps for student parents in campus culture, policies, physical space and student services. It shares recommendations to support colleges and universities in increasing college completion rates of parenting students, who represent 1 in 5 undergraduate college students nationwide. "These findings echo the experiences of the young parents in college who we work with every day at Generation Hope," said Founder & CEO Nicole Lynn Lewis. "Higher ed came into this pandemic facing dropping enrollment. Now, as institutions grapple with the question of whether students will return in the fall, these findings will be even more crucial in assisting them in factoring in the needs of parenting students in their re-enroll and retention efforts."



Citing: National Student Parent Survey Results & Recommendations:

Uncovering the Student Parent Experience and its Impact on College Success by Generation Hope

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New Research Reports

Do Generous Parental Leave Policies Help Top Female Earners?

IZA Institute of Labor Economics│Gozde Corekcioglu, Marco Francesconi, and Astrid Kunze│May 2020



Generous government-mandated parental leave is generally viewed as an effective policy to support women’s careers around childbirth. But does it help women to reach top positions in the upper pay echelon of their firms? Using longitudinal employer-employee matched data for the entire Norwegian population, we address this question exploiting a series of reforms that expanded paid leave from 30 weeks in 1989 to 52 weeks in 1993. The representation of women in top positions has only moderately increased over time, and career profiles of female top earners within firms are significantly different from those of their male counterparts. The reforms did not affect, and possibly decreased, the probability for women to be at the top over their life cycle. We discuss some implications of this result to put into perspective the design of new family-friendly policy interventions.



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Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2019, Featuring Supplemental Data from April 2020



Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System│May 2020

This report describes the responses to the 2019 Survey of Household Economics and Decision making (SHED) as well as responses to a follow-up survey conducted in April 2020. The Federal Reserve Board has fielded this survey each fall since 2013 to understand the wide range of financial challenges and opportunities facing families in the United States. The findings in this report primarily reflect the financial circumstances of families in the United States in late 2019, prior to the onset of COVID-19 and the associated financial disruptions. At that time, overall financial well-being was similar to that seen in 2018 for most measures in the survey. Consistent with economic improvements over the prior six years, families were faring substantially better than they were when the survey began in 2013. Even so, the results highlight areas of persistent challenges and economic disparities across financial measures, even before the spread of COVID-19 in the United States. In particular, the substantial disparities in overall well-being by race and ethnicity remained in 2019, and the disparity by education widened in recent years.

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Opportunity engines: Middle-Class Mobility in higher education



Sarah Reber and Chenoah Sinclair│ The United States Commission on Civil Rights│April 1, 2020

Inequality in the United States has been rising in recent decades, while intergenerational mobility remains low. This means that absolute mobility—the extent to which children are economically better off than their parents—is declining, and intergenerational inequality is increasingly entrenched. A long literature suggests large returns to attending college and points to the importance of higher education for intergenerational mobility. Recent work by Opportunity Insights explores in more detail the role that different colleges play in promoting upward mobility, pointing to significant differences across colleges in the extent to which they enroll students from low-income families who have high earnings as adults. Here, we use the data produced by Opportunity Insights to focus specifically on students from middle-class families to understand patterns of attendance and upward mobility for the middle class.



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Hispanic Adults in Families with Noncitizens Disproportionately Feel the Economic Fallout From COVID-19



Urban Institute│Dulce Gonzalez, Michael Karpman, Genevieve M. Kenney, Stephen Zuckerman│May 6, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic threatens to upend the well-being of many Hispanic adults and their families. Already, the pandemic is affecting Hispanic adults’ family financial security to a greater extent than other racial/ethnic groups. As of late March/early April 2020, nearly 6 in 10 nonelderly Hispanic adults were in families where someone lost a job, work hours, or work-related income because of the coronavirus outbreak, and close to 5 in 10 experienced some material hardship in the past 30 days (Karpman et al. 2020). Underlying these disparities for Hispanic adults is their disproportionate representation in industries most likely affected by the pandemic and their lower likelihood of having jobs that can be performed from home (Berube and Bateman 2020).



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On the Frontlines at Work and at Home: The Disproportionate Economic Effects of the Coronavirus Pandemic on Women of Color



Center for American Progress│Jocelyn Frye│2020



While much of the U.S. focus has been on the erratic stock market, steep business losses, stay-at-home orders, and the scope and pace of legislative and administration responses, too little attention has been paid to the daily impacts on communities and the needs of families across the country. Women of color, in particular, play a vital role in maintaining the economic stability of their families and communities—and therefore, understanding COVID-19’s impact on this group is critical to overcoming the current crisis. Yet the public discourse about the most-needed interventions has largely overlooked the pandemic’s cascading effects on women of color, leaving them out of policy debates on what actions must be taken moving forward to sustain families while reinvigorating the economy.



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The Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR) is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization that conducts and communicates research to inspire public dialogue, shape policy, and improve the lives and opportunities of women of diverse backgrounds, circumstances, and experiences. Find out more about IWPR at iwpr.org.

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