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Women Have Lost (Slightly) More Jobs Than Men During the Pandemic

I don't remember what inspired me to look at this, but it's been a while since I've plotted pandemic job losses separately for men and women. Here's a version of the chart I posted earlier this morning split up by sex:
As you can see, the lines cross each other several times, which means your conclusions depend a lot on your ending month. If I wrote about this in November, I'd say men had lost more jobs than women. In December I'd say it was about equal. This month it looks like women have lost more jobs than men.

Which they have. As of January, men have lost 4.1 million jobs while women have lost 4.5 million. What's more, over the past three months men have been trending (slightly) upward while women have been trending (slightly) downward. And the labor participation rate has dropped more for women than for men.

This is still too small and variable a change to call the pandemic a "women's recession" or anything like that, but we might be heading in that direction. It all depends on the nature of the recovery in the second half of the year.