She-cession: unveiling the pandemic’s impact on women in the workforce

[00:00:04] Gabriel Miller: Welcome to the Big Thinking Podcast, where we talk to leading researchers about their work on some of the most important and interesting questions of our time. I’m Gabriel Miller and I’m the President and CEO of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

[00:00:19] Women’s employment was hit especially hard by the Covid-19 economic slowdown, causing some to call it a “she-cession”. But what exactly does the term mean, why did it happen, and what does it tell us about the future of our economy?

[00:00:34] Today I am joined by Armine Yalnizyan, the Canadian economist and writer to discuss the she-cession and the broader impacts of economic crises on women.

[00:00:46] Gabriel Miller: You really are one of the preeminent economic communicators in the country. Someone who, when you read your stuff or hear you in the media, it makes what's happening economically make sense to people in a way that it doesn't always. And you're known in particular, among other things, for your use of the term she-cession.

[00:01:12] And we're going to turn to that in a second. But I want to start by going back to the period when you coined that term in the first few months of the pandemic. And, when I think back to February 2020, and I think about what was on my mind and most other people's minds, it was how do we keep healthy? Are we washing our groceries enough?

[00:01:41] When will we get masks? And I'm sure you had a lot of those same preoccupations as well. But I would imagine pretty quickly your, your economist brain kicked in. I just want to ask you, what do you remember about your thoughts in those first few weeks after the pandemic hit and, and your thoughts about what this would mean to people's jobs, and livelihoods?

[00:02:05] Armine Yalnizyan: In January and February of 2020, I pay attention to European news, and I read international papers and it had already unfolded quite dramatically in Europe and in Asia. That stories were starting to come out that something very unusual was happening. And I remember in February of 2020, one of my closest friends had, like, spent years saving for a vacation in France and was determined to go in March.

[00:02:32] And I kept saying, you can't go. Like, you're gonna, like, you might be signing your own death sentence. You might not be able to get home and get the care that you need. And, that person did not believe me and it took their daughter to say, no, this is coming to a neighborhood near you. So in February I was already paying attention to how it was unfolding elsewhere in a very personal manner for one of my best friends.

[00:02:58] And I realized as things were starting to get shut down that what was being shut down was the inessential economy, to be able to contain the contagion as much as possible. And the definition of what was inessential was the things that we love to do: go out and party, you know, go out and have a meal, have a drink, travel, shop, you know, the stuff that you don't need to shop for, just all the things that you would want to do, go to sports events, go to the theater, all the things that you would want to do to be alive and have fun and not just simply work, that was what was going to shut down.

[00:03:34] And the defining feature of a lot of those industries was they were female dominated. And so "economist brain" kicks in and reminds me of the 2008 - 2009 financial crisis and how it was such a big event and how it was described as a “he-cession” and I thought, oh yeah, this is gonna be a she-cession.

[00:03:59] Gabriel Miller: So, tell us what you remember about the first day that you used this term, because I think there's an interesting story about that.

[00:04:08] Armine Yalnizyan: The day I first used that term she cession during the pandemic was when I was being interviewed with another economist on March the 30th, 2020 with Matt Galloway on the CBC national program called The Current. And I used the term she cession I kind of like dropped it, without really thinking too much about it.

[00:04:28] And he repeated it immediately. “She-cession”, he said, skipped a beat, said it again “she-cession?”. And I realized that I was taking for granted something that had registered with me years before, but had sudden, suddenly big relevance. And the reason it registered with me years before is because, in the wake of the 2008-9 global financial crisis, a New York Times article, called the recession that occurred, a he-cession, and I realized because I have done gendered analysis of business cycles for years, that every recession is a he-cession.

[00:05:10] As I went back to look at that data, every recession from 1981-2 - which was the biggest loss of jobs since the Great Depression -1981-2 1990 - 1991, which was a made in Canada recession because of the Bank of Canada fighting to wrestle inflation to the ground, and then, the 2008 - 9 recession, every time we had one of these upheavals, between 92 and 97 percent of the jobs lost in the first month were lost to men.

[00:05:46] Usually making in goods, in mining, like, it was goods production, it wasn't service. But because what we were about to do was to reduce services to people, and because services are female dominated, you knew you could use that term, “he-cession” to apply to this new phenomenon, which would be a “she-cession”. It would be gendered at the beginning as it was, 63% of all jobs lost in the first month were lost to women, the men caught up, just like they caught, the women caught up previously. The men caught up to the women, but they also rebounded the most quickly.

[00:06:25] Their jobs came back. They were the first jobs to come back after we stopped suppressing economic activity. So it's just like it was a fascinating reversal of economic history.

[00:06:38] Gabriel Miller: So, I wanna make sure I understand that part. So you're saying, as we started to recover, it was actually the male dominated jobs that came back, started coming back first.

[00:06:47] Armine Yalnizyan: Yeah, I don't know if, I don't know where you're located but here in Ontario the first thing that Doug Ford permitted to reopen were golf clubs, marinas, car dealerships and, hardware stores and they're all male dominated. So that's what came back first as opposed to general retail, um, restaurants, spa services, which are female dominated.

[00:07:11] They were all services, but it was the male dominated services that because they're outdoors, were brought back first.

[00:07:18] Gabriel Miller: How much do you attribute that to the specific nature of the pandemic versus, you know, ingrained biases in public policy and the way we see the economy? Do you see that as being a major contributor? Or was this strictly just it's a pandemic and these are the industries that get hit hardest first and the ones that will come on later?

[00:07:45] Armine Yalnizyan: In my view, I think it was strictly the pandemic and we didn't know what would happen when we reopened. So we were reopening the things that we felt was, thus far, not showing us signs of being high risk.

[00:07:59] As you know, Canada, rebounded to full headcount of jobs much faster than the United States because we did keep employers hold through the Canadian Emergency Wage Subsidy queues and through CERB (editor’s note: Canada Emergency Response Benefit) so, there was purchasing power and those two things meant that particularly in Canada, we saw a faster rebound of headcount, not necessarily of hours of work, but of headcount who had a job who didn't have a job.

[00:08:29] And the thing that was lagging, even though we had fully recuperated the head count, were again, women, and the women, that were lagging were those aged 55 and older. And we don't know why they were not joining forces as fast as every other age group, young women, prime age women, all in like a dirty sock right at the beginning, rebounding. And, you know, back in the summer of, I think it was the summer of 2020, I had a like little summer jingle, "no recovery without a she-covery, no she-covery without childcare", and everybody sang along and before you knew it, like within about a year of that jingle, we had a child care program because people realize that, taking care of the people that are too young is the job primarily of women, and that's prime age women. And you want those prime age women back in.  

[00:09:24] Gabriel Miller: I'm interested in talking to you a little bit about the legacy of the she-cession. You've mentioned the childcare plan that came into effect.  

[00:09:32] Would you say that you, you feel like the pandemic had shown policymakers something that they hadn't been able to either fully appreciate or gave them a sense of urgency around this issue that hadn't been there before?

[00:09:47] Armine Yalnizyan: Oh, I think that's such a complex question because I think there was a changing of the guard inside the government and who the gatekeepers were.

[00:09:55] Gabriel Miller: Right, the Prime Minister's office.

[00:09:56] Armine Yalnizyan: Yeah, the prime minister's office and who's ultimately going to okay something, when it comes to a big spending ticket. You, you understand that for 50 years women had asked for a national childcare program and that it was denied over and over again including by this first self-declared feminist government of Canada who was all in about the middle class and the people that wanted to join it. You would think this was a natural for them and I remember being in the lockup in 2016 for the budget and again in 2017 and I asked the people from the PMO, where's childcare?

[00:10:31] I mean, you're doing so many things, but where's childcare? And they, the exchange looks amongst them, you could tell this was a big debating point, but it was still one of these things that, there's not enough votes in it, you know? people have kids, it's expensive, it's terrible, and then they forget about it, it’s like childbirth, there’s just not enough votes in it for the cost.

[00:10:54] Um, so, you know, they just think, well, I dealt with it, you can deal with it. And that was the mentality, until the pandemic. And by the time the pandemic happened, two different factors are happening: we are starting to realize that the pandemic is colliding with demographic issues that had been, you know, that's the slowest moving train on the planet is demographic changes and already in 2019, we were seeing the lowest unemployment rates we had seen in 50 years. And that's because more people were starting to retire than young people were coming into the labor market, which is one of the reasons why we talk about immigration as being, you know, “the salvation”, as it was in the 1950s, as it was from 1890 to 1910. We have been through this movie before, where immigration is the way you float your boat, in terms of the economy.  

[00:11:51] But the second thing that happened is we changed finance minister; we went from Bill Morneau to Chrystia Freeland. Chrystia Freeland's mom was a complete feminist and had advocated for childcare. She had it in her blood that she wanted to pay homage to her mom, at least that's the way she projected it. Certainly she wasn't as resistant as Bill Morneau was, and then she got herself a deputy minister whose mom was also, Laura Sabia, was also a huge feminist.

[00:12:23] And so these, this, they tagged team in a way that made the political salability of this at the center very different and the Prime Minister got it immediately. It was his entourage in the PMO - in the Prime Minister's office - that had kind of stopped it, but politically they got the collision of demographics and economic potential for prime age women in particular who are more educated than any other generation before to deploy that human capital. They got what it meant and then they had this wonderful example in Quebec that showed what would happen if you did it. We had over, we had 20 years of data showing that it literally paid for itself.

[00:13:10] Gabriel Miller: You know, it's, it's really a discussion I think is worth exploring some more now but also in a lot of other places because obviously people, I hope, have it on their minds to ask how did the pandemic change us? How does it, how does it change us in terms of our ability to respond to an economic crisis, a public health crisis?

[00:13:30] How does it, how has it changed us in terms of our responsiveness to issues that frankly had been sitting in front of our nose in some cases for decades? And, this has been on my mind, I think on the minds of a lot of people in a slightly different context, maybe at like a micro level in terms of the changes that we've seen in workplaces.

[00:13:50] We have a little organization, 20 staff, and everything you've said about child care and the demands on working women, I would say I knew at an intellectual level, but it was really logging on to calls during the pandemic and seeing, you know, the women I worked with try and balance, in some cases, a two year old in one arm while they're continuing to write press releases or plan events.

[00:14:18] That made me feel, as we came out of it, that the notion we would just go back to everyone in the office five days a week, I know that's all sorts of challenges for people who have to drop kids off and get them. But we're going to ignore all of that, we're going to ignore everything we've seen. It just was a non-starter.

[00:14:35] And so, it's sort of encouraging to think that, that it helped or contributed to some of the momentum that's made some changes on things that, have been going on for, far too long. Maybe I'll just ask you, looking back now, three and a half years since the pandemic, I think I've got my math right there.

[00:14:55] And since this light bulb went off for you about, the unique nature of, of this economic crisis, has that initial kind of analysis of it as a she-cession, does it still describe pretty carefully what you see in the rearview mirror?

[00:15:10] Armine Yalnizyan: Oh, in terms of what happened, 100%. There was nothing like it. And unless you have a pandemic where you're trying to contain a contagion by cutting out non-essential activity, it won't happen again.

[00:15:23] So much of what women do are non-essential. But the pandemic also revealed how essential women are because they're disproportionately the people that provide the care and the care economy. And what the pandemic showed us is the care economy is the foundation of the entire economy. Without it, people get sicker quicker, they can't get to work, they can't develop themselves.

[00:15:46] There's so many factors, you know, and you can't deploy whatever skills you have if what you're doing is taking care of the people that are too old, too young and too sick to work by providing unpaid care. So the role of the paid part of the care economy is super important. And the pandemic revealed that and we call them essential workers and we call them our heroes.

[00:16:12] And then when we went, we went right back to underpaying and undervaluing them. Because the Venn diagram between a labor of love and a job is very large in the care economy. We cannot get by without care. From cradle to grave, there are times when we are going to need it. But whether we can access it because of its affordability, is such a concern for so many people that we continually undervalue the people that provide that care.

[00:16:42] Gabriel Miller: So, let's talk about this care economy because it, it really jumps out in your work as a central preoccupation and it, it sounds when you describe, the she-cession, it really makes sense that our attention would turn to this bigger question. Briefly, what's the care economy?

[00:17:00] Armine Yalnizyan: Yeah, it's a good question because nobody really defines it. The care economy is really about how we take care of those who are too young, too old, and too sick to work. And we do that through some combination of paid and unpaid care.

[00:17:16] Because it's the love economy really. It's the foundation of everything else we do. But increasingly as, the population ages, it becomes a bigger part of the economy. And as an economist, I measure it with just two sectors: how much work and GDP (editor’s note: Gross domestic product) is generated out of the health care and social assistance industry sector and the education industry sector. And these two things together are the care and feeding and development of our minds, bodies and souls.

[00:17:52] We can't bring in, you know, over a million people every year, half a million of whom are permanent residents, but we're bringing in a flood of temporary residents to deal with our labor market shortages with Quebec, the federal government has acknowledged that they are having trouble getting people providing the care in long term care facilities, in child care, in hospitals as orderlies, primarily the under-trained people that are doing the really ugly work of care.

[00:18:23] Those people that are doing the really ugly work of care. Those are the people that they can't find because they won't pay them more because we don't want to pay them more.

[00:18:30] I'm just going to remind you, Quebec and Ontario had the military brought in to personal care, brought in to long term care facilities. I'm just going to remind you that the military had to be brought in to retirement homes and long term care homes because these people were so overworked and understaffed and apparently the answer to our workforce issue was open up the spigots on temporary, temporary foreign workers, migrant workers, like what?

[00:18:56] There, there's nothing temporary about this issue given demographic pressures. And that the fact that these primarily privately owned long term care facilities will not pay their workers more.  

[00:19:08] Gabriel Miller: I completely agree with you and I think if aliens came down to Earth and debriefed on the past three or four years, the thing that they wouldn't be able to get their heads around is how much of that tragedy was about, what happened in nursing homes and long term care facilities and how little of that seems to be what we want to talk about now.

[00:19:32] And of course, you know, I understand it's not a pleasant conversation, but it does, it does kind of go to our powers of, um, I don't know if I want to say denial, but certainly our powers of looking away from something, even when it's not in our own best interests. And so that, I want to dig into this because I think it's so important what you're talking about.

[00:19:54] There does seem to be an almost, uh, certainly self defeating tendency here to, on the one hand, be looking at services when it comes to, say, personal care workers or child care workers who are delivering some of the most important service anyone could provide in our society, that will go to the well being of our children or to our own health and well being or the well being of our parents and grandparents.

[00:20:21] And yet this compulsion, I think as you've described it, to do it on the cheap. Why don't we map this out a little bit? Because you've talked, I think, a bit about the distinction between kind of truly public services versus what we're seeing in areas like childcare or long term care where there seems to be reluctance to make an investment of the kind we need.

[00:20:44] Is that a fair description? And can you describe a little bit of what the, um, what are the symptoms? What are the consequences of this on the cheap approach we're taking to the care economy?

[00:20:57] Armine Yalnizyan: It's not just long-term care and childcare. It isn't just care of the elderly and frail and disabled and children - people that can't work. It is now a contagion that is spreading to the healthcare industry. And it means that where it comes to chronic care, like for young children or for people that are too sick and too old to work, it means inferior quality of care, it means we are warehousing people that aren't in shape to work, or not ready to work, or are not in shape to work.

[00:21:33] We are warehousing them instead of caring for them. That will have the most profound consequences for the next generation. Fertility rates are still falling and actually plummeting since the pandemic as young people are unable to move out of home, are unable to connect with others, are unable to afford their own place, or if they are affording their own place, unable to afford a place that is big enough for having a family. So, fertility rates continue to drop, making children our absolutely most precious resource, but if you under invest in their early learning and education, you know, our brains are hardwired in the first five years. So, warehousing a child so that you can go to work is one thing, but actually developing that child's cognitive abilities so that they can thrive at learning actually unlocks a whole other wave of returns on investment.

[00:22:30] If we choose not to do that because it's cheaper, then we are going to reap what we sow in 15 to 20 years at a time exactly where the boomers are in their 80s and they're not going to be working anymore. Some of them might be working now, but they're not going to be working in their 80s. And that's exactly when we need that next generation to step up.  

[00:22:52] But my point here is that we have traded off quantity for quality and that has bigger implications for children than it does for the seniors. But it has huge implications for people that love older people whether that's your family or somebody that you love and then you're gonna stop working to be able to help that person because without your help, they're not gonna get that drink of water.

[00:23:19] They're not gonna get any assistance in eating. They're gonna perish because these facilities are so understaffed, or they're going to get drugged, you know, like there's just terrible consequences for the working age population as we permit the underinvestment in the staffing side of these facilities to underinvest in the care of the people we love when they're too old to be useful in a way.  

[00:23:45] In healthcare for doctors and hospitals, we decided we would give each other - in the 1960s - we decided we were going to give each other a guarantee of access and that is actually now also crumbling because of underinvestment and three years of pandemic that burned so many people out when a registered nurse cannot take a vacation that was on the books for three months because there's chronic understaffing, that nurse walks away and says “I'm going to go work for an agency.”

[00:24:21] So we end up paying more anyway, you know? Because that's what the hospitals are turning to is temp-agencies. There's nothing temporary about the situation that we have created by public policy design in our hospitals. We've been struggling with this for over 20 years and done nothing about it in terms of public policy. So you reap what you sow. Might take you 20 years, but you're gonna get it.

[00:24:45] Gabriel Miller: I want to really punctuate part of what you said because I think it, it's really important to keep in mind as we head into a period that it looks like we're going to have more emphasis on, fiscal belt tightening in government. And it's this idea that, if I'm hearing you correctly, there is the humane social perspective on this, which is, providing these services at a high quality and ensuring access is the right thing to do for people because we need to care for them. But also, critically, you see this as an absolutely essential part of an economic strategy to keep us viable over the next, two, three decades.

[00:25:32] Is that, is that a fair way of describing us that, that this cannot be kind of, it can't be pushed off as yes, that's a, a nice soft hearted dream, but, brute economic reality requires that we count our pennies here. In fact, the message is as much for people who are worried about our economy as people who are worried about how we're treating people in our communities.

[00:25:55] Armine Yalnizyan: You can’t un-entwine them you know? You cannot divorce social development from economic development. They're one and the same. So, if your choice is: well, it just costs too much to provide good childcare, so, we're just going to make sure there's a safe place for your kid to be. But they may not necessarily get the support that some kids are going to need in the preschool years. Guaranteed that more kids are going to drop out of formal education.

[00:26:32] Guaranteed that more kids are going to not get to their full potential in terms of, human capital. So, you know, there is no separation between economic and social development. Older people are more problematic, but older people are problematic because the people that care for them that are younger and in working age care for them.

[00:27:01] And so they're going to do it, they're going to eat into their paid working time to care for these older people because they're not getting sufficient care, which means again, you are not maximizing the contribution they could be making to the employed workforce. Third point is if you make these jobs, every job, a good job in the care economy.

[00:27:23] If you make every job a good job in that sector, you've actually grown your economy, you've actually improved purchasing power. This could be the spine of the middle class, just like manufacturing was in the 50s to the 70s. Already 20 percent of all jobs, over 20 percent of all jobs are in the care economy, in health and social assistance and education in those two sectors, one out of five jobs already.  

[00:27:51] So like we, we, like we cut our nose off to spite our face by saying “you know, oh, we could save money by just not paying these people more.” And don't forget, as the public sector falters, and we're seeing private equity move into health care, the private sector sees that there's a cash cow out there, that some people are willing to pay more.  

[00:28:16] I mean, honestly, it is just the most maddening economic story because with the same amount of money, we could be providing so much better care for so many more people, but we choose not to do that over and over and over again. It is crazy making.

[00:28:32] Gabriel Miller: So let's talk a bit about how we make a different kind of choice. And I want to ask you about something I understand you've called for, which is a Canada wide workforce strategy for the care economy. What, what does that mean to you?

[00:28:48] Armine Yalnizyan: I've been thinking, about a workforce strategy because all we've been talking about is cost. Because in the care economy, the number one input is care. It is the human resource that provides the care. You can have all the hospital beds you want if you don't have a nurse, it's just a mattress, right?

[00:29:06] So we do need some kind of a strategy, but the difficulty of having a care economy strategy, per se, is that different aspects of care require different types of qualifications to provide the care.

[00:29:21] And some care is for free. It's a labor of love. We do it for free in the home or for the people that we love. So, putting those requirements in is problematic, yet they should be there if we are paying somebody to give us the best quality care.

[00:29:40] Then if you're going to train people and have qualifications that you say you want in place, or even if you're not going to train them, there should be something that ensures that you're minimizing turnover in the sector, which is marked by huge turnover because these workers are so consistently undervalued.

[00:29:59] And high turnover reduces care, right? Just the fact that a child knows who their childcare worker is, or somebody that is suffering from dementia knows who the person is that is coming and speaking to them. That level of consistency of care means that you have to be reducing the type of turnover we have.

[00:30:21] You do that through wages and benefits. You make sure that people feel valued and that they, they feel that they can stay in this job and not rush out to get the first best thing that pays a little bit more or offers a better benefit package. And then I guess the last element is the idea of having some control over your working time.

[00:30:45] So what does that mean in terms of the actual workplace? At the micro level, most places are understaffed. And when you are understaffed, you don't have any control over your working time. You are expected to work overtime. You're expected to do back to back shifts. You're expected to skip out on vacations. Blah, blah, blah.  

[00:31:05] There's got to be a relationship between qualifications and wages that actually acknowledge that you have got qualifications, that there are benefits and wages that keep you in place to reduce turnover, and that you have some control over your working time because you're not so chronically understaffed.

[00:31:24] And those, that, that magic has to happen in equal measure everywhere, in the care economy.  

[00:31:32] Gabriel Miller: You've talked about the fact that some of the progress we've seen in recent years on child care follows decades of evidence that those investments and that access needed to be improved. For our audience listening to this conversation, who are hoping it doesn't take another 40 years to address questions around a Canadian care workforce strategy.

[00:31:56] What would you say to, to an audience member to be watching for to know if there's a step being taken or progress being made or signs of government taking these issues seriously. Is there something that we should be pressing government for and watching for in the near future?

[00:32:13] Armine Yalnizyan: That's an excellent question, and I would suggest that no matter what jurisdiction we're talking about for the next election, whether that's federal or provincial, or even municipal in some cases, like in Ontario, that, the contender have an answer for what they are doing about this growth, this spike in the permanently temporary workforce in the care economy. Whether that's a personal care worker or a childcare worker or even an orderly in a hospital even a registered nurse, frankly, are now on the list of the permanently temporary that are the solution to our labor shortages.

[00:32:49] So show me how you would fix that, show me how you would reduce the number of people that are, by policy design, churning through the system instead of coming to do a job and staying to not only do that job but build their lives here. The second thing I would say is how are you improving the wages and benefits of the people you say you need so badly?

[00:33:12] That part of the reason why we have a labor shortage is because we so undervalue the worth of the people that do provide care, which are in the majority women. So, what would you be doing to actually reduce churn and increase retention of the people you've already got by showing them how you value them?

[00:33:34] So those would be the two hallmarks I would have. The third one would be is how do you propose - sir or madam - to offset the labor shortage, which is absolutely predictable as demographic changes ensure that the population is going to age and we're going to have the smallest working age cohort in history that is going to need some help with the unpaid care that needs to be done.

[00:33:58] How do you propose to offset what looks like a chronic labor shortage? What would be your solution to labor shortages?

[00:34:12] Gabriel Miller: Thank you for listening to the Big Thinking Podcast and to my guest, economist and writer Armine Yalnizyan. I also want to thank our friends and partners at the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, whose support helps make this podcast possible.

[00:34:26] Finally, thank you to CitedMedia for their support in producing the Big Thinking Podcast. Let us know what you thought of this episode and share your feedback with us on social media. Follow us for more episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcast and Google Podcast. A la prochaine!