10-24-2021 Women to Watch - Flipbook - Page 50
By Michelle Deal-Zimmerman
Time to ‘makeup’ for progress
lost during pandemic
T
he pandemic is over in the same way the fight for women’s rights is over. The devastating and ongoing effects
are easily obscured by the undeniable progress that has
been made.
Vaccines, check! Woman vice president, check!
Antibody therapy, check! A seat at the table, check!
Masks, check! Makeup available in every skin tone, check!
Wait a minute, you say; makeup isn’t exactly the type of warpspeed advancement we might consider notable in the continuum of
equal rights. But Rihanna — the superstar behind the shape-shifting,
industry-changing brand Fenty Beauty, which has brought us the
rainbow foundation of multitudes — is certainly of
note.
She of recent membership to the billionaire class
— unmarried and child-free — is exactly someone
who can be readily cited as an example of the spectacular advancement of women, not to mention
Black women. Who can really argue with that kind
of achievement?
If only we could all stand under her umbrella.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the
number of women in the job force is at its lowest level since 1988. There are fewer Black women, HispanFREEPIK
ic women and white women employed compared
with early 2020 before the pandemic hit. More than
a million moms, with children under age 13, are no longer working.
In other words, over the past year or so, women’s progress has hit a
fairly significant bump, and how we structure the ongoing economic
recovery will determine if it’s simply a slowdown or a U-turn.
There are some signs that, as always, women will make a way.
Nearly half of new entrepreneurs in 2020 were women, according to a
survey by Gusto, a company that administers payrolls and employee
benefits. The same survey showed that for a majority of these startups, the innovation was clearly driven by economic need, with about
a third of all respondents saying their new endeavor was the result
of a job loss.
Across the U.S. labor market, the jobs that have disappeared have
been in sectors where women are typically represented at higher
numbers including education, retail, hospitality and personal services. This decline in employment opportunities had a major impact on
minority women, according to The Pew Research Center.
Of the 2.4 million women exiting the labor pool from February
2020 to February 2021, over a million were Black or Hispanic. “Collectively, Hispanic and Black women accounted for 46% of the total decrease among women but represent less than one-third of the female
labor force in the U.S.,” a Pew analysis found.
Add to that the loss of women in senior roles, either through early retirement, burnout or child care needs, that is reversing strides
made in corporate leadership. The Women in the Workplace 2020
study by McKinsey & Company, in partnership with LeanIn.org, found
top-level working women were 1.5 times more likely than their male
counterparts to consider “downshifting their role or leaving the workforce because of COVID-19. Almost three in four cite
burnout as a main reason.” Altogether, the study
found the changes wrought by the pandemic could
setback working women by half a decade or more.
Maybe that sounds puny, but it took less than
a year to come up with some fairly incredible vaccines to protect us against COVID-19. What if we
just wiped away that progress? Big advancements
sometimes come in great leaps, but more often it’s
small steady strides forward that lead us to where
we want to be.
Strides like those made by the 25 Women to
Watch featured here. A woman who was her family’s first college graduate and now she’s the first
Black president of a local community college. A former government
cybersecurity expert who now leads an executive office for a Fortune
500 company. An immigrant who was told she wasn’t the type to get
a college degree and proved those early doubters wrong by being the
type to get multiple college degrees.
It’s not that these stories cannot or will not happen in our postpandemic world (whenever we get there). They absolutely will — but
not in a vacuum. Without acknowledging what we have lost, we won’t
be able to decide what we must gain and how.
Changes to the U.S. workforce over the past year or more have
upended calculations for measuring women’s progress. A refreshed
women’s movement that focuses on job retention, child care support,
living wages and small business incubators for the innovations women are eager to create.
That’s the new foundation we really need.
And one of Rihanna’s Fenty Killawatt highlighters couldn’t hurt.
Michelle Deal-Zimmerman is senior content editor for features. She can be reached at nzimmerman@baltsun.com.
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