Vice President Kamala Harris said on Thursday that the 2.5 million women who have left the workforce since the beginning of the pandemic constituted a “national emergency,” one that she said could be addressed with the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan.
“Our economy cannot fully recover unless women can participate fully,” Harris said on a video call held with several women’s advocacy groups and lawmakers, essentially reiterating the argument she made in a Washington Post op-ed published last week. “Women leaving the workforce in these numbers is a national emergency which demands a national solution.”
According to Labor Department data, some 2.5 million women have left the American workforce, compared with 1.8 million men. As part of its relief plan, the Biden administration has outlined several elements that officials say will ease the burden on unemployed and working women, including $3,000 in tax credits issued to families for each child, and a $40 billion investment in child care assistance, and an extension of unemployment benefits. Harris said it would “lift up nearly half of the children that are living in poverty” in the United States, a claim backed up by a Columbia University analysis of the plan.
The proposal has no Republican support in Congress, but Democrats aim to pass the plan using a fast track budgetary process, known as reconciliation, which would allow them to push it through the Senate with a simple majority. (Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, unveiled his own child tax credit proposal earlier this month, but it was promptly panned by his Republican colleagues.)
In her call on Thursday, Harris painted a dire picture of the reality that millions of women are facing as the pandemic continues to dig its teeth into American life.
“In one year,” Harris said, “the pandemic has put decades of the progress we have collectively made for women workers at risk.”
Childcare remains an issue for working mothers: Nearly 400,000 child care jobs have been lost since the outset of the pandemic, Harris said. The closings of small businesses and the loss of millions of jobs have created the “perfect storm” for women, and particularly for Black business owners, she added. “The longer we wait to act, the harder it will be to bring these millions of women back into the workforce.”
The administration’s relief proposal would provide some $130 billion to assist in the reopening of K-12 schools, a major source of child care, but how and when to do so — and how to explain decision-making to Americans — has proved to be a stumbling point for the president and his advisers.
The Biden administration has promised to reopen as many schools as possible within the first 100 days, a promise that is already under stress by teachers’ unions who want to be assured that safety measures will work before schools reopen. On Thursday, Harris kept her remarks on schools limited, saying the plan would “provide funding to help schools safely reopen.” On Wednesday, Harris said in an appearance on the “Today” show that “teachers should be a priority” to receive vaccinations.
As the pandemic drags on, the statistics for women are indeed bleak.
In a report published last year by researchers at the University of Arkansas and the Center for Economic and Social Research at the University of Southern California, researchers and economists found that female employment began plummeting almost immediately once the virus took hold last spring. Since then, the report found, women have shouldered a heavier load than men when it comes to providing child care.
Non-college-educated women and women of color have been disproportionately affected. Another report, published last fall by the Brookings Institution, showed that nearly half of all working women have low-paying jobs. Those jobs are more likely to be held by Black or Latina women, and they are in sectors, including dining and travel, that are among the least likely to reach a degree of normalcy anytime soon.
“Women are not opting out of the workforce,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn. and the chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee, said during the meeting with Harris, “they are being pushed by inadequate policies.”
When asked on Thursday afternoon if President Joe Biden shared Harris’ view that a decline in women participating in the workforce constituted a national emergency, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, did not directly answer, but she did say Biden was concerned with the issue.
“The president has conveyed, in many meetings I’ve been in, his concern about this directly,” Psaki said, “and I know he’s discussed it with the vice president as well.”