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Noura Eltabbakh was working as a full-time server when the Covid-19 pandemic struck.
Like thousands of Vermonters, she was let go from her Burlington restaurant in March and went weeks before seeing her first unemployment check.
She doesn’t know when she’ll return, or if she even should. “The money would be so much worse,” she said, with new measures limiting how many people can dine in.
More than 80% of tipped workers in Vermont are women, like Eltabbakh, and her experience reflects a unique concern among experts: Women may be hit particularly hard by the economic fallout of the coronavirus crisis.
Women held 55% of the 20.5 million U.S. jobs lost in April, according to federal unemployment data out last Friday. Although last December marked the first time in a decade women held more payroll jobs than men, the unemployment rate for women is now 15.5% — 2.5% higher than it is for men.
This is a change from what happened at the start of the Great Recession, when more men were laid off, although they also went back to work more quickly.
In Vermont, women make up well over 50% of the employees in some of the sub-sectors hardest hit by the pandemic, like personal care services and child care. Though men and women are about even in the broad food and services sector, women make up a large majority of the tipped jobs.
Stephanie Seguino, a University of Vermont economist, said that women “are always in a worse position because their incomes are significantly lower than men’s, and it means they have fewer savings.”
“And if the businesses that they work for are likely to go bankrupt because of lack of sufficient support, then those women are going to have a harder time … getting jobs again,” she added.
Vermont women have made some gains in recent years in the workforce, including in the number of new businesses opened. Experts are concerned that the pandemic will erase some of those gains made over the last decade by women – from owners to employees.
Cynthea Hausman has owned her eponymous spa on Burlington’s Church Street for over a decade. Before the pandemic, she employed six women, some of whom are the sole breadwinners for their family. Hausman is grateful she has a different full-time job, and that her employees could receive unemployment benefits.
But she is concerned about how long her “high touch” business will have to remain closed. And “even if we are open, will clients return in the numbers that we need them to in order to be a viable company?” she wondered.
“I think that we will survive but there is definitely — I know people say it over and over again — but there is going to be a new normal,” she said, adding, “We’re caretakers, so we want to make sure we’re caring for our customers, and we miss them terribly.”
Women-owned businesses in Vermont remain significantly smaller than those owned by men, raising concerns they might not be able to weather the economic disruption. And some of the businesses with the highest rates of female ownership in Vermont, like personal care services, have already been among the hardest hit by pandemic shutdowns.
“If we extrapolate from (the smaller size), they are disproportionately going to be the ones that don’t make it through this crisis unless the federal government acts in a way that prevents that,” said Seguino, the UVM economist.
Running a “one woman show”
Crystal Maderia has owned Montpelier farm-to-table restaurant Kismet for almost 15 years. Female chef–owned restaurants are still in the significant minority, but she has witnessed staggering growth in that sector in recent years.
Maderia had to pare down her mostly female staff of 32 to a “one woman show.” Right now, she’s cooking a limited takeout menu to use up inventory she bought before closing down in March.
“It’s not a profitable model,” said Maderia, who has had to funnel some of her personal savings into the $10,000 a month it costs to keep her restaurant open and empty.
Maderia was a single mother when she started Kismet. She can’t imagine being in that position now. “I have so much compassion and heartbreak for women who are right now trying to take care of their families, and who also have businesses that they’re personally guaranteed to,” she said.
Even if the governor does allow restaurants to reopen, she doubts it would be “financially feasible” to reopen Kismet with fewer tables. And she’s concerned about the extent to which her kitchen staff could realistically keep 6 feet apart.
“We have a very intimate thing we do here, the serving of our guests and the way that we take care of our employees and the way we work together,” she said.
Maderia said Kismet was not among the small businesses that applied for a federal PPP loan, as she does not know when she’ll be able to have employees back on payroll.
National experts are worried that women and minority-owned businesses are more likely to have been denied PPP loans due to their smaller sizes and lack of access to existing capital.
Vermont female business owners are also twice as likely as men to not have any employees. Tiffany Bluemle of Change the Story Vermont said she’s especially concerned about the impact of the pandemic on sole proprietorships and self-employed people “who have now lost two months of income and … may never ever be able to recover.”
The lack of child care during the pandemic is hitting women harder than men — women do more unpaid care and head more Vermont single-parent households. Nationally, women working full time during the pandemic are now doing 71.5 hours of home labor a week compared to men’s 51.5 hours, according to a recent McKinsey survey.
In the last recession, job losses began in construction and manufacturing, leading some experts to think the downturn would be a “man-cession,” said Seguino, the UVM economist. But as time went on, unemployment figures for single mothers spiked, she said.
Seguino believes the lack of child care will lead to more women – single mothers and those with working partners – to not return to work. That’s partly because the gender wage gap — Vermont women make 84 cents to every dollar a man makes — could make women more likely to stay home and take care of their kids if they struggle to find help.
If “you have two people in the household and somebody is going to stay home and take care of the kids, it’s more likely to be the person with the lower salary,” Seguino said.
Bluemle saw a silver lining in employers possibly becoming more amenable to flexible working arrangements after the pandemic.
Elaine McCrate, another UVM economist, noted that certain businesses are now required under federal law to provide up to 12 weeks of paid leave to employees without child care.
“Not working … is not an option”
Women also make up a majority of the workforce on the frontlines of the coronavirus crisis.
In Vermont, 73% of health care workers — and 83% of health care support workers — are women. As of the end of March, at least 36 health care workers had tested positive for the coronavirus, Seven Days reported.
“These are the women who are being asked to take on dangerous work … and at the same time, do double-duty at home to do the unpaid care work,” said Seguino.
She also noted that as women dominate some of the fields deemed essential during the pandemic, there has been “extreme inequality” amongst women in how the coronavirus layoffs have impacted them.
Child care workers are another disproportionately female sector deemed essential during the pandemic. Some have been working through the state of emergency to provide care for essential workers, while others will return to work once their centers reopen June 1.
Anne Audy was furloughed last month from her job as an early childhood educator at Heartworks Preschool in Shelburne. In the couple weeks when she was working from home at the end of March, the Ferrisburgh mom would conduct Zoom classes while watching her 3-year-old.
As she is having a baby at the end of June, Audy will not be going right back to work when her center reopens. She still hopes to follow her original plan of returning to work at the end of the summer, in time to start teaching a new class.
But not without trepidation.
Audy, who teaches kids who are under 3, feels the state needs clearer guidelines for early childhood educators who work with young kids who may be unable to wear masks and who “put everything in their mouths, who cough and sneeze and leak all sorts of bodily fluids.”
“I have a great deal of concern about how staff, children and their families can be protected.”
While she will still be eligible for unemployment once her center reopens as an expectant mother, Auden said she is unclear on whether that benefit would continue when she is the mother of a newborn.
“Not working or not having income for me is not an option, so we have to calculate all those risks,” she said.
Lawmakers recently passed a hazard pay bill to bump up pay for essential workers who have been at increased risk of contracting the virus.
Advocates worry the historical inequities women have faced in employment – the average gap between the average salary of men and women working full time in the Green Mountain State is $8,000 – will deepen during the crisis.
“We know where women are starting, which is that more of them are concentrated in low wage jobs, more of them are tipped workers,” said Cary Brown, the executive director of the Vermont Women’s Commission, in an interview during the week of Equal Pay Day in late March.
Rhoni Basden, executive director of Vermont Works for Women, said in an interview shortly after Scott declared a state of emergency that her “biggest concern” for the women her organization works with is how many of their jobs would return, and what the economic landscape will look like.
“How can we really make sure women are getting back on their feet?”
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