The pandemic has negatively impacted everyone.
Except for maybe dogs. After spending a year inside with their owners,
dogs have had so much face time, they're now asking for a break to see other people.
While we're still adjusting to this new world, one thing we've certainly learned is the answer to the
media's favorite asinine question: - Up next, can women have it all?
- Can women have it all? - Career or family? It's a
struggle for a lot of women. - Can women have it all?
- Can women have it all? - Can women really have it all? Look around,
we've got three working women right here, so I got a feeling it's gonna get a little feisty.
Can women have it all? Was Sarah Jessica Parker not clear enough? No matter how hard women try
to have it all, Seth Meyers will always be there ready to take them out. Take a Closer
Look at that, Meyers! Asking if women can have it all was already a stupid question, but now,
it's even more absurd. Last month, the Biden administration called the number
of women leaving the workforce a “national emergency.” But perhaps the biggest tragedy of
all is what other people are calling this trend. - Economists are calling this troubling trend
a “she-cession.” A recession that's disproportionately affecting women.
- Some are calling it a “she-cession.” - You coined the term
“she-cession.” What does the she-covery look like? A “she-covery” basically looks just like a regular
recovery, but with a couple of funbags. It's especially upsetting considering that in December
2019, women actually outnumbered men in the U.S. workforce. Unfortunately, just like my friendship
with Justin Timberlake, some things have to end. - COVID has decimated a lot of careers for women.
- A recent study says 1 in 4 women is considering leaving the workforce as a
direct result of the COVID crisis. - Put simply, women lost their
jobs at a rate four times more than men. It's a statistic almost as sad as how I need
to wax my mustache at a rate four times more than men. By October, more than two million women had
left the workforce, dropping the percentage of women working or looking for work to its lowest
since 1988. All you needed to be a working girl back then was a head for business and a bod for
sin. Of course, I was a teenager in ‘88, so I had a head for Swatch watches and a bod for Rick
Astley. From the start of the pandemic, women lost more jobs than men because they were more likely
to work in restaurants, hair salons, retail stores, or in crowded bars teaching McLovin
what it means to respect women. In September of last year, as the school year started, we saw
the real economic impact when more than 860,000 women dropped out of the workforce. In December,
women even accounted for 100% of jobs lost. - Women lost all of the gains they had made
in the past decade. So post-Great Recession, they lost every job they had gained in the
previous 10 years in just one month. Right now, we are at a labor force participation
that we haven't seen in 30 years. Like, we've lost a generation of gains. It's
not going to be a snap back thing. It's going to be a long road to recovery for women.
Which explains why the new Rosie the Riveter slogan is now just “FFF********K!”
Many women were forced to leave work because, suddenly having lost most child care options, the
burden of caring for kids most often fell on them. - The day that our school system announced that
our children were going to be starting remote, I turned in my resignation.
- Single mom Michelle Perez worked retail for years. But with her kids at home doing
virtual school, she couldn't work the hours she used to. That's why she was laid off.
- When her son's school shut down, she was forced to choose between child care
and career. Vondetta says when the nonprofit she worked for demanded more work than she could do in
a day while juggling child care, she lost her job. - 2020 forced me to have to make hard decisions,
and I chose my family. I also chose my family. Unfortunately,
they did not choose me. That's the real reason why I don't do the show in our backyard anymore.
At their peak, school closures affected at least 55 million students. That's both hard
on parents and weird kids whose only friends are the teachers. Another reason women are leaving
the workforce is that nevertheless, the gender wage gap has persisted. Earning ability affects
who stays home with kids, sick family members, and plants. Plants can be such high maintenance
a**holes. As of 2018, women earned, on average, just 82 cents for every dollar earned by men,
and experts say the wage gap is only going to get wider in the coming years, as the recession forces
more women to leave the workforce. Faced with all these obstacles, it's not surprising that
women are choosing to have fewer children. - There had been talk of maybe a baby boom
because everyone is locked in their house quarantining, but now we're
hearing more about perhaps a baby bust. - People make long-term decisions when
they have confidence about the future. And if there's anything that undermines confidence
about the future, it's this massive pandemic. - Turns out, stress isn't the best aphrodisiac.
And fewer dates, bars, and chance encounters also mean fewer oopsies.
There you have it. The pandemic is causing fewer oopsies, fewer zoinks, and a lot
less oooOOOoohhhh. But hey, at least this should make conservatives happy: fewer oopsies
also means fewer aborsh-adoodles. In light of the pandemic, many women are changing their timelines
for starting a family. In one survey, one third of women said they wanted fewer children because of
the pandemic. Furthermore, Black and Hispanic women were more likely to say they wanted to
delay having children than white women, leading economists to project a COVID baby bust of around
300,000 fewer births in 2021. The bottom line is many women don't have a choice in whether they
join or leave the workforce and whether they have or don't have children. So can we please
finally kill the question “can women have it all?” It's sexist, and it frames the
idea of balancing work and children as a personal choice. If we want to support families and women,
we need strong public policies, like universal preschool, subsidized child care, and paid family
leave. Without those things, women will continue to drop out of the workforce, and the economy
cannot fully recover unless women are in it. We need to end the she-cession. And we need to stop
calling it that! If anything, it should be the Great She-pression. But no one f***ing asked me,
which is stupid because this is basically my whole job, and I was right here the whole time.