Earlier this week, Harvard professor Claudia Goldin won the Nobel Prize in economics, only the third woman in history to do so. In this conversation with Goldin from last year, we hear how her focus on women in the workforce has led to great discoveries.
From February to May 2020, almost 12 million American women lost their jobs compared to 9 million men. But new analysis finds that gender was not the main driver behind those job losses for women.
Gene Smirnov
“I m just hoping to create those good memories, so she won t remember all this, so it won t be at the forefront for her,” Latrish Oseko told me. She was planning a fifth-birthday party for her daughter, Ka’laya, and some of her friends. They were going to Sky Zone, a trampoline-park franchise, near their home in Wilmington, Delaware. It was a birthday celebration, but also a moment to rejoice that they’d made it through a terrible year and that they had a home again.
Oseko knew she was in trouble as soon as the pandemic hit. “I was a contract worker, so I thought I would probably be one of the first people to be laid off,” she said of her job as an administrative assistant. Sure enough, her employer cut her hours in half at the beginning of April 2020. A month later, they dropped her entirely. Her boyfriend, Keith, was able to hold onto his job at a local university, though he was furloughed for a period. “But I was glad he was able to stay employed,”