Women were the ones who lost the most jobs in the pandemic, points out IBGE

A survey shows that, in the job market, women were the main ones affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. Between 2019 and 2020, of the total of 825,300 jobs lost, about 71% were occupied by women. The data are from the Central Register of Companies (Cempre), released this Thursday (23), by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics.

While the number of salaried employed men fell by 0.9% from 2019 to 2020, that of women decreased by 2.9% in the same period. This reduction in the female workforce is explained, according to the research manager, Thiego Ferreira, by the impacted sectors. Of the 20 analyzed in the Cempre survey, 13 had a fall in female employees. Three of these segments had a reduction of more than 10% in women’s jobs.

Activities that historically employ more men have increased in staff in 2020, while those that employ more women have retracted. This is what happened, for example, in the area of ​​education, composed mostly of women (66.9% of the total), which lost 1.6% of its staff.

Trade, the sector that concentrates most of the salaried women (19%), had a fall of 2.5% in the total number of employed persons. But among women in this segment, the drop was greater: 3.2% against 1.9% of men. In construction, a sector in which 90.6% of those employed are men, there was an increase of 4.3% in the number of salaried workers.

“Women participated in sectors that had a fall. So, for example, education, housing and food are sectors in which women traditionally have a greater participation. In education, almost 67% of the workforce is made up of female labor, in food, it is almost 56%. These are sectors that we can see that suffered very large impacts with the pandemic and caused this difference in fall”, explains Ferreira.

As a result, for the first time since 2009, there was a reduction in female participation in salaried employed persons, from 44.8% in 2019 to 44.3% in 2020, the lowest level since 2016.

“When our historical series begins, in 2009, women represented 41.9% of all employment by salaried people. Each year, this percentage has clearly and consistently increased, little by little. In 2019, it reached the highest value: 44.8%. And when the pandemic came, this share dropped, we went back three years”, points out Thiego Ferreira, manager of Statistics at Cempre.