A gloomy possibility is that women in Britain have been pushed into paid work because their partners have lost income
This was unusual. One study of 38 countries found that around two-thirds saw men’s lead in employment over women widen between 2019 and the second quarter of 2020. But in Britain it narrowed, by an amount second only to Luxembourg. Most stark was the divergence between the paths of young men and women. In June the employment rate for men aged 25-34 was 2.4 percentage points below January 2020. For women of the same age it was 0.7 percentage points higher.
A generous furlough scheme probably contributed at first, as until May more of the affected jobs were held by women than by men. More recently, however, the balance has evened out. Another factor is that before the pandemic, men were twice as likely to be self-employed as women, and self-employed workers were not covered by the furlough scheme. That left them more exposed when covid-19 hit.
Why did the experiences of younger men and women diverge so much? Hannah Slaughter of the Resolution Foundation, a think-tank, says that before the pandemic 25- to 34-year-old men were about as likely to be self-employed as men in other age groups. But the sectors they worked in, such as construction and manufacturing, were hit harder when lockdowns started.
The bigger mystery is perhaps why employment among younger women fared so comparatively well. One clue is a large drop-off in people staying out of the workforce to care for their home or family, says Ms Slaughter. That could suggest a silver lining to the pandemic, namely the rise of remote working, which makes it easier to juggle employment and family.
On September 30th the furlough scheme will finally close. And a new study by Jonathan Cribb and Adam Salisbury of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a think-tank, suggests that women could be more vulnerable to consequent job losses. Once you strip out the sectors most likely to bounce back from pandemic-related shutdowns, such as air travel and tourism, women made up 55% of those furloughed in June.
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