Covid-19 and gender gap in labor force participation

This article describes how the gender gap in labor force participation has worsened as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic in several advanced economies and provide some reasons that may explain why Australia, Denmark, Norway, and the United Kingdom have been able to reduce that gap.

The gender gap in labor force participation in the third quarter of 2020 “was around 0.8% higher than in the first quarter of the year” in the economies of United States, Canada, Japan or South Korea. 

Two main reasons explain this performance according to the article:

• Sectors hardest hit by the Covid-19 crisis are those with higher proportion of women such as retail stores, restaurants, and the hotel and hospitality business.
• The increase of family responsibilities because of school clousures mainly fall on working mothers' shoulders

Countries such as Australia, Denmark, Norway, and the UK, contrary to that trend and not by accident, were able to reduce the gender gap in labor force participation by 0.5%t in the third quarter of 2020, which according to the authors could be explained by two main reasons:

• Successful government support measures to protect those sectors where women are overrepresented (for instance in UK Businesses in the retail, hospitality, and leisure sectors companies are entitled to one-off cash grants of up to £25,000).
• Government programs supporting childcare that helped parents to retain their jobs (for instance the Australian government provided free childcare to around one million families from April 6 to July 12).