April saw 165K fewer women in the labor force compared to March

Yahoo Finance’s Emily McCormick reports the latest women employment statistics in April.

Video transcript

KRISTIN MYERS: Well, the jobs figures were a big miss. But as the economy recovers, the labor market recovery has not been even, with women dropping out of the labor force, at least for the month of April, for the first time since January. We have Yahoo Finance's Emily McCormick here with those details and the latest figures. Hi, Emily.

EMILY MCCORMICK: Hi, Kristin. And as you mentioned, this was a disappointing jobs report on a number of measures. And one of those was also what it showed about women in the workforce. As you mentioned, we saw the civilian labor force for women over the age of 20 decreased for the first time since January with about 165,000 women leaving the market in April from March. Now this means that they were neither employed, nor were they looking for work last month. And that's why we saw the overall civilian labor force increase when you include men back into that statistic.

So that participation metric is a key thing to keep in mind because the Labor Department did note this morning that the unemployment rate for women 20 years and older was 5.8%. Now, on the surface, that actually does look pretty good since the national average was 6.1% and that 5.8% also decreased month over month. But a lot of that decline came simply because women had left the labor market altogether and were not even looking for jobs anymore. And we did see that in the participation rate for women, which was just 56.1%, compared to what we saw for men 20 years and older at 69.8% in April.

Now I also want to highlight the fact that we have been noting that women of color especially have been hit hard by the pandemic, especially. That's a fact that even Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell has been highlighting. And we did see tens of thousands of Latinas age 20 and older drop out of the labor force last month. I do want to note that we saw 134,000 Black or African-American women in that age group return in April over March. So the unemployment rate for them was well above the national average at 8.6%.

Now, we've been hearing over the course of the pandemic that women have been disproportionately dropping out of the labor force to take on more of the responsibilities when it comes to childcare around the house, with schools closed for in-person learning. So a lot of economists are saying that it really is going to take these kinds of reopenings, and this kind of support also from the private sector, in order to reach that maximum employment and to get these women back into the labor force in the numbers that we've been seeing in other areas in the economy. So, overall, quite a disappointing jobs report on a number of measures here, including when it comes to women in the workforce. Kristin and Alexis.