【纽约时报精读】美国女性正在被赶出劳动力市场

　　【纽约时报精读】美国女性正在被赶出劳动力市场  原文译文

　　*注：本文摘自9月9日《纽约时报》

　　Why are women being driven out of the U.S. workforce?

　　为什么女性被赶出美国的劳动力市场?

　　1. MORE THAN 12 MILLION AMERICANS ARE unemployed, COVID-19 infections are spiking, and thousands of schools and childcare centers have yet to reopen in person. The group bearing the brunt of all that? Women.

　　1200多万美国人失业，新冠感染人数激增，数千所学校和托儿中心仍在关闭。首当其冲的是哪个群体?女性。

　　2. From August to September, 865,000 women— compared with just 216,000 men—dropped out of the U.S. labor force, according to a National Women’s Law Center analysis of the latest jobs report. Meanwhile, 1 in 4 women are considering downshifting their careers or leaving the workforce altogether, per an annual Women in the Workplace study published in September by McKinsey & Co. and the advocacy group Lean In. “There’s no historic parallel for what’s happening here for women,” says Nicole Mason, president and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “We have nothing to compare it to: not to the 2008 recession or the Great Depression.”

　　根据国家妇女法律中心对最新就业报告的分析，从8月到9月，美国有86.5万女性失业，而男性只有21.6万。与此同时，根据麦肯锡公司和倡导组织Lean In 9月份发布的年度职场女性研究报告，四分之一的女性正在考虑减慢工作节奏，有的甚至打算干脆退出职场。妇女政策研究所的主席兼首席执行官尼科尔·梅森说:“妇女所面临的困境在历史上前所未见的，我们没有什么数据可以作为参考，2008年的大萧条和这都没法比。”

　　3. Some of those numbers can be attributed to the types of jobs women often hold. Women dominated industries, including health care, education, food service and hospitality, have been among the hardest hit by the COVID- 19-induced recession. When restaurants lost their dine-in business, for example, they laid off servers—70% of whom are women.

　　其中一些数字可以归因于女性通常从事的工作类型。包括医疗保健、教育、食品服务和酒店业在内以女性为主导的行业是受新冠导致的经济衰退影响最严重的行业之一。举例来说，当餐馆没了生意之后，他们会解雇服务员，而其中70%是女性。

　　4. But layoff s and furloughs explain only part of the picture. Many women are leaving the workforce not because their jobs have vanished but because their support systems have. With schools and childcare facilities closed, the job of caring for and educating kids has fallen disproportionately on women. And, though the World Trade Organization has found that the larger trend holds true globally, with women more likely to feel the economic disruption of COVID-19, the U.S. is unique among industrialized nations in the ways it has failed them. Unlike most other industrialized nations, the U.S. doesn’t guarantee paid parental or sick leave through permanent and universal federal laws.

　　但裁员和强制休假只是部分原因。许多女性退出职场，不是因为她们的工作岗位消失了，而是因为她们的支持系统失灵了。由于学校和托儿机构关闭，照顾和教育孩子的工作大多落在了妇女身上。此外，尽管世界贸易组织发现，这种趋势在全球范围内都是存在的，即女性更有可能感受到新冠对经济的破坏，在工业化国家中，美国女性对此的感受更是深刻。与其他工业化国家不同，美国没有永久性或者普遍性的联邦法律来保护带薪产假和病假。

　　5. Women’s decisions to exit the labor force won’t just impact their own professional lives. A 19-year, 215- company study out of Pepperdine University found a strong correlation between companies promoting female executives and their profitability. In addition, when fewer people are able to participate in the labor force, gross domestic product decreases while the cost of labor increases. And if more dual-income families with children opt for one parent to stay home, discretionary consumer spending will suffer too.

　　女性退出劳动力市场不仅只是影响她们自己的职业生涯。佩珀代因大学用了19年，调查了215家公司，发现，公司提拔女性高管与其盈利能力之间存在很强的相关性。此外，当能够参与劳动的人数减少时，国内生产总值下降，劳动力成本上升。如果更多有孩子的双职工家庭选择父母中的一人待在家里，可自由支配的消费支出也将受到影响。

　　6. Nor will the fallout be purely economic. The pandemic has unraveled years of advances in creating more equal workplaces. In the six years McKinsey and Lean In have conducted their workplace study, men’s and women’s attrition rates had always moved in tandem—until now. “To think that we may lose all the hard- earned progress we’ve seen in the representation of women in a single year,” says Rachel Thomas, the CEO of Lean In, “it really has us breathless.”

　　其影响也不会纯粹只是经济方面的。这一流行病打破了多年来在创造更平等工作场所方面取得的进展。在麦肯锡和Lean In所进行的历时六年的工作场所研究中，直到现在，男性和女性的减员率一直是同步变化的。Lean In的首席执行官雷切尔•托马斯说:“一想到我们可能会在一年之内失去这些来之不易的进步，我们就喘不过气来。”