The gender furlough gap
Posted: Thu Feb 06, 2025 4:39 am
Why did women stop working at higher rates than men?
Bozena Wielgoszewska, Research Fellow at the Social Research Institute, University College London and former UK Data Service Data Impact Fellow, discusses the gender furlough gap.
The COVID-19 pandemic affected women’s employment rates more adversely than men’s. Why?
In March 2021, a year into the pandemic, it myanmar rcs data was already widely documented that women were furloughed at higher rates than men, leading to the pandemic being labelled as a ‘shesession’. However, the mechanisms behind this phenomenon were less clear.
In our research, we used data collected at that time from the surveys conducted among participants of the longstanding British Cohort Studies. Our study shows raw gender furlough gaps of three percentage points. We also show that women were around five percentage points less likely than men to remain in active paid work, and four percentage points less likely to remain in the same job. The differences in furlough rates are particularly striking, especially for women who lived with their partner and children.
Occupational segregation
One potential reason for this is that women were ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time’, working in jobs that were more affected by social distancing measures. Women are generally more concentrated in jobs requiring face-to-face interaction (such as travel and services), but they are also more likely to work in jobs considered critical at the time (such as health, social care and education). Our research shows that, once job characteristics (namely occupation, being a key worker and working part-time) are taken into consideration, the initial gaps are reduced, but do not disappear. Even in critical occupations, women were more likely to be furloughed.
Bozena Wielgoszewska, Research Fellow at the Social Research Institute, University College London and former UK Data Service Data Impact Fellow, discusses the gender furlough gap.
The COVID-19 pandemic affected women’s employment rates more adversely than men’s. Why?
In March 2021, a year into the pandemic, it myanmar rcs data was already widely documented that women were furloughed at higher rates than men, leading to the pandemic being labelled as a ‘shesession’. However, the mechanisms behind this phenomenon were less clear.
In our research, we used data collected at that time from the surveys conducted among participants of the longstanding British Cohort Studies. Our study shows raw gender furlough gaps of three percentage points. We also show that women were around five percentage points less likely than men to remain in active paid work, and four percentage points less likely to remain in the same job. The differences in furlough rates are particularly striking, especially for women who lived with their partner and children.
Occupational segregation
One potential reason for this is that women were ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time’, working in jobs that were more affected by social distancing measures. Women are generally more concentrated in jobs requiring face-to-face interaction (such as travel and services), but they are also more likely to work in jobs considered critical at the time (such as health, social care and education). Our research shows that, once job characteristics (namely occupation, being a key worker and working part-time) are taken into consideration, the initial gaps are reduced, but do not disappear. Even in critical occupations, women were more likely to be furloughed.