COVID-19’s impact on women’s employment

 Women around the world have been deeply affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has heightened the large and small inequalities—both at work and at home—that women face daily. For this year’s International Women’s Day, which UN Women has themed “Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world,” we have curated a series of charts that McKinsey has published over the past year that illustrate the pandemic’s gender effect, what it might cost society over time, and what could help set the course for a brighter future.

Before COVID-19, women had slowly been making some progress in the workplace

At the beginning of 2020, the representation of women in corporate America was trending—albeit slowly—in the right direction. Between January 2015 and December 2019, the number of women in senior-vice-president positions increased from 23 to 28 percent, and in the C-suite from 17 to 21 percent. Though the numbers were progressing slightly upward, women remain dramatically underrepresented, especially women of color.

Our pre-COVID-19 research had never shown women opt out of the workforce at higher rates than men

Since 2015, McKinsey, in partnership with LeanIn.Org, has surveyed hundreds of companies each year to benchmark women’s progress in the American workplace. In every year through 2019, the average overall attrition rate for companies (percentage of employees leaving) was even slightly higher for men than women.

But COVID-19 dealt a major setback

The pandemic had a near-immediate effect on women’s employment. One in four women are considering leaving the workforce or downshifting their careers versus one in five men. While all women have been impacted, three major groups have experienced some of the largest challenges: working mothers, women in senior management positions, and Black women. This disparity came across as particularly stark with parents of kids under ten: the rate at which women in this group were considering leaving was ten percentage points higher than for men. And women in heterosexual dual-career couples who have children also reported larger increases in their time spent on household responsibilities since the pandemic began.