In an abrupt shift, 1 in 4 women are considering leaving the workforce
Working women, especially women of color, are being affected by the COVID-19 crisis disproportionately.
The path to complete gender equity in the workforce has been a long work in progress, especially for women of color, but trends have consistently bent in the right direction overall. Now, it seems, the pandemic has changed that.
Now, in a stunning, abrupt reversal, more than a quarter of working women say they are considering demoting or leaving the workforce entirely, a McKinsey study found, a figure researchers say would have been “unthinkable just six months ago.”
McKinsey’s sixth annual “Women in the Workplace“ report for 2020 illustrated the depth and magnitude of the pandemic’s detrimental consequences on women and working mothers, in particular.
Every year since 2015, women and men at every level have considered leaving and actually left their companies at comparable rates. Now, the evidence suggests the workplace challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic — blurred boundaries between work and home, worries about a family’s health and finances, and burnout — have disrupted that trend, disproportionately hurting women.
Work-life balance in the pandemic is taking women out of the workforce
At the beginning of 2020, the representation of women in corporate America was trending in the right direction, most prominently in senior management roles. Between January 2015 and January 2020, representation of women in senior-vice-president positions grew from 23% to 28%, and representation in the C-suite grew from 17% to 21%.
In 2020, McKinsey research found that women are now 1.3 times more likely than men to have considered stepping out of the workforce or slowing down their careers, particularly mothers, senior women, and Black women.
McKinsey partner Jess Huang says in the worst-case scenario, if women leave the workforce at the rates they say they are considering, corporate America could lose over two million women in the workforce and over 100,000 women in senior leadership roles in the short term. According to Huang, this could potentially wipe out the progress made over the last six years.
The pandemic may be to blame, but it is not the root cause. Experts explain the magnitude of the pandemic’s impact on working women has been driven by underlying vulnerabilities, intensifying challenges women already struggled against.
Read the full McKinsey 2020 Women in the Workplace report online.
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