This year is being humouredly referred to as a dumpster fire, and while there have been challenges not to mention a technical and industry-specific recession, the pandemic of COVID-19 has brought issues that we’ve not ever seen historically.

What’s a She-cession?

Most economists and financial analysts predict future outcomes or trends based on historical data. They’re simply justified and evidence-based notions. However every other time in the past 100 years that there’s been a recession in North America, it’s been manufacturing-based. What does that mean to the average household? It means that male-dominated professions are hit the hardest, while services are only struggling because of a lack of money within the economy (the “ripple effect”).

This current economic impact is the complete opposite — a she-cession. We’re seeing service-based businesses hit with a major loss of revenues. Those service-based professions — economists call them the “5 C’s: cleaning, catering, cashiering, clerical and caring” are predominantly held by women in the workforce. Those positions are either being decreased or deleted altogether as businesses in those sectors are being forced to close down or drastically modify the number of customers they can serve.

On top of the service-based recession, we’re seeing women in North America leaving the workforce at drastic numbers because they’re CHOOSING to stay home to either facilitate their child(ren)’s remote learning or because it’s easier to manage the possibility of their child being sent home when they don’t have to juggle a job. Note that this childcare responsibility, by the evidence being self-reported in North America, is falling largely to the women in the household.

And yet…

With all of the “free cash” that the Government of Canada is putting in the hands of many Canadians, we’re seeing personal incomes up by 10%, which is fuelling the shape of our current economic recovery. The government stimulus must come to an end at some point, and while it would be expected that many women who have chosen to leave the workforce voluntarily will return once it makes sense for them, the bigger issue remains: affordable, reliable and sustainable childcare.

If nothing else, this pandemic has shone a light on many cracks in our current systems, including long-term and senior care, along with childcare. There are more and more single-parent families that do not have the choice to leave their employment to take care of their child, and risk losing their job entirely if they’re not able to juggle. Likewise, with the safety precautions as they are, many families that rely on grandparents for after school care and the like don’t have that ability right now.

Armine Yalnizyan wrote in October 23rd’s Financial Post, “Only a minority of workers can work from home (39 per cent, according to Statistics Canada) and now even some of those people are starting to throw in the towel after seven months of juggling paid work and full-time but unpaid childcare and home-schooling. The people most likely to ‘quit’ this untenable — but utterly fixable — situation are women. Which may explain why in September, as an additional 54,000 men joined the labour market, 57,000 women left it. This is the first time in decades we’ve seen such gendered differences.”

So why should you care?

Quite simply, this she-cession is more than just an economic issue for North America/Canada. Yes, it slows our economic recovery as those incomes remain depleted, but it also affects the ability for service-based businesses to operate and to grow. With so many women out of the workforce, if those businesses aren’t able to find talent, they’re not able to satisfy the demand for their services in a post-COVID world. A lack of supply raises prices, and so now many of the common services that may have otherwise been reasonable become out of reach financially (think cleaning services, at-home care, and yes, definitely childcare spots will be in high-demand). The ripple effects of that could severely impact households as their taxes may be on the rise at the same time, and their household incomes lower as stimulus programs end. This would make the “she-covery” slow to say the least without other solutions at play to bring women back into the labour market.

A report called The She-Covery Project: Confronting the Gendered Economic Impacts of Covid-19 in Ontario outlines some solutions to the issue, including Child care, Flexible Work and Entrepreneurship — something that many out of work women in Canada have turned to in the pandemic.