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Given that a high proportion of workers in "essential" sectors of the US economy are Black women, this paper seeks to answer the following: in which occupations did Black women in the US experience the greatest job losses during the early phase of the pandemic? Drawing on feminist economic and stratification economic theories, this quantitative analysis suggests that the greatest losses were cashier jobs in the hotel and restaurant industry, and childcare worker positions in the healthcare and social services industry. These two occupations are low wage, dominated by women, and considered essential. This study posits that Black women disproportionately lost these jobs for three reasons: (1) Black women's strong attachment to the US workforce; (2) Black women's overrepresentation in the hotel/restaurant and healthcare/social services industries; and (3) women's overrepresentation in low-wage occupations. The study offers policy solutions that could help sustain the Black community during the pandemic-inspired economic downturn. HIGHLIGHTS Black women face occupational segregation that is specific to both their gender and their race. Black women's employment is more narrowly concentrated by industry than any other demographic group. Job losses due to COVID-19 especially hit industries in which Black women are concentrated. Black women lost the most jobs in the cashier occupation. Any pandemic-recovery policy agenda must include full employment for Black women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, a recent spate of popular media attention has focused on whether mothers, especially highly educated mothers in their thirties, are increasingly "opting out" of employment. This paper uses data from the Current Population Survey's Annual Social and Economic Survey (ASEC) to examine whether children cause women to exit employment. This paper finds that the "child effect" on women's employment has fallen since the end of the 1970s. The child effect was -21.8 percentage points in 1979 and has fallen consistently over the last two decades to -12.7 percentage points in 2005. Between 2000 and 2005, the child effect grew from -11.1 to -12.7, but the change was statistically insignificant. Recent declines in women's employment may be more an effect of the weak labor market for all women, mothers and non-mothers, rather than an increase in mothers voluntarily choosing to exit employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reform of the United States welfare system in 1996 drastically changed welfare receipt for low-income lone mothers. This paper explores the effects of these changes on lone mothers by summarizing empirical work on caseload reduction, labor force participation, income, poverty, material hardship, and family formation. While it appears that the economic status of many lone mothers improved during the economic expansion in the late 1990s, many lone mothers continued to experience poverty and material hardship. Building on the work of feminist scholars from both the US and other countries, this paper goes on to critique mainstream research on welfare reform. It identifies a particularly feminist approach to welfare reform research, stresses its advantages over mainstream research, and speculates about why there is comparatively less feminist research to date. The paper concludes by calling for more structural analyses of poverty and of lone motherhood itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether the contribution of the declining share of wages in national income to the upswing in profitability between 1982 and 1997 in the United States was aided by the growing incorporation of women into employment. The analysis finds that women helped moderate the decline in the aggregate wage share. The reduction in gender pay disparity overwhelmed the negative effect of women's growing share of market work on the wage share. However, in (one-digit) sectors where wage shares fell, women did not contribute to restraining the fall, indicating that the aggregate outcome was the net result of distinct sectoral trends in women's employment conditions. We argue that the perverse process of labor productivity falling faster than the real wage in the service sector may have played a key role in shaping the aggregate outcome. The post-1997 trends in the US are discussed in a postscript. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes employment hours, supplemented by interview data, from large highway construction sites in Boston, Los Angeles, and Oakland in the 1980s and 1990s. This study suggests that affirmative action positively affects the employment of women in construction and where there is more pressure, there are stronger results. Second, white women and women of color tend to work in trades that reflect the existing racial hierarchies among men. Therefore race as well as gender should be reflected in the design and measurement of the impacts of employment programs. Community organizing, advocacy for women and men of color, judicial oversight and positive efforts by unions and employers are still critical to bridging the gap between policy intentions and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]