AAUW WEBINAR: COVID 19 AND THE LABOR ECONOMY: WHAT’S NEW

 As Sharon Heck mentioned in her President’s Message, National AAUW has been offering many webinars on ZOOM on subjects vital to our organization with the advent of the pandemic. Members are notified via e-mail and it is easy to sign up for these free programs.

The one on September 9 was about the effect of Covid l9 on the Labor Economy and especially on women. It featured our President Kim Churches in conversation with Diane Lim, an economist and author of “Economist Mom Blog.” She pointed out that this pandemic recession is a “She” session as opposed to the great recession which affected mostly middle aged white men in industry whose jobs did not come back. Women did better then because they were service providers and thus had lower unemployment.

The present pandemic has affected service providers in jobs mostly held by women, especially those earning lower incomes and less well educated. The recovery will be different now especially because school aged children are at home and whether women work or not will depend on their family situation. Asian women will have higher unemployment rate because they are unlikely to leave the supervision of their children’s education to others.

She believes that there has to be more value put on care givers and that government has to fill the gap. She notes that the pandemic has given more appreciation to the stresses of working mothers.

Members can access any of the AAUW webinars about a week after shown by accessing the aauw.org website. I urge our members to either watch them live or recorded in order to take advantage of all that AAUW has to offer us nationally.

Dolores Seidman