By Arthur Dos Santos, Masai Gordon, and Adam Prince
Imagine millions of jobs vanishing almost overnight, leaving workers across the world in uncertainty. The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t just disrupt daily life—it triggered one of the most dramatic shifts in unemployment rates in modern history. In early 2020, before the pandemic hit, the United States’ unemployment rate had fallen to 3.5%, the lowest it’s been in the past 50 years. However, there were underlying issues in an evolving job market, such as declining labor force participation driven by an aging population, which still persisted and increased the severity of the collapse caused by the pandemic. We explore how the COVID-19 pandemic affected male and female unemployment rates to understand how unemployment rates respond to crises and which demographic is most vulnerable to these economic shocks. By studying these shifts, we are able to gain important insight into the labor market and its inequalities. Understanding differences in unemployment by gender reveals how economic shocks can amplify existing inequalities. By identifying who is most vulnerable, policymakers and economists can create improved support systems for these groups during future crises.
In total, employment “fell by 8.8 million over the year, as the COVID-19 pandemic brought the economic expansion to a sudden halt, taking a tremendous toll on the U.S. labor market” (Smith, Edwards, and Duong 2021). However, this disruption was not experienced evenly across demographics. Researchers analyzing data on the differences between male and female unemployment during the pandemic describe this as a “she-cession, where women’s labor market outcomes and prospects have deteriorated more than men’s” (Bluedorn et al. 2022). These disparities highlight the importance of examining gendered unemployment patterns, especially when creating recovery policies. Our analysis builds on this research, tracing how male and female unemployment evolved over the pandemic, and reveals who was most affected along with who recovered quicker.
Data Analysis
Figures 1 and 2 show monthly unemployment rates for men and women, respectively, in the United States from 2016 to 2025. Data comes from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Using this data, we examined the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on male and female unemployment rates in the United States. In the months leading up to the pandemic, male unemployment rates were low and declining. Male unemployment rates were 3.2% in January, 3.3% in February, and 4.1% in March 2020. However, from March to April 2020 alone, the male unemployment rate surged by 8.9 percentage points, rising from 4.1% to 13.0%. It was not until December 2022, nearly 36 months after the United States’ first reported COVID-19 case, that the male unemployment rate returned to the pre-pandemic rate of 3.2%. 
Female unemployment experienced similar qualitative changes but had key differences in magnitude and timing. Like the male unemployment rate, the female unemployment rate was relatively low in the months leading up to the pandemic. The female unemployment rates during January, February, and March 2020 were 3.3%, 3.1%, and 4.0%, respectively. Just as the male unemployment rate experienced a dramatic increase in April of 2020, the female unemployment rate also did but with a steeper increase, peaking at 15.5%. This represents an 11.5 percentage points increase from March to April 2020. Unlike the male unemployment rate, however, the female unemployment rate returned to its pre-pandemic levels in April 2022, only 28 months after the United States’ first reported COVID-19 case.
Our findings suggest that the female unemployment rate, which saw an increase of 12.2 percentage points between January and April of 2020, was more severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic than the male unemployment rate, which saw an increase of 9.8 percentage points in that same time frame. The female unemployment rate, however, recovered to pre-pandemic levels roughly 8 months before the male unemployment rate followed suit. The sharper initial increase in female unemployment rates can be attributed to the disproportionate representation of women in fields that were most heavily affected by the pandemic. Due to the lockdowns that were enforced in numerous jurisdictions throughout the United States, many service-based industries saw sudden declines in employment, some of which include education and health services, (where 74.8% of the workforce was made up of women in 2020), healthcare practitioners and technical occupations (77.4% women), and leisure and hospitality (53.2% women), according to the reports on “Employment of Women by Industry Sector, Seasonally Adjusted” by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Given the greater representation of women in these fields compared to men, there was a greater increase in female unemployment compared to the increase in male unemployment immediately at the start of the pandemic. However, because businesses in the service sector started to adapt and reopen in May 2020, female unemployment rates began to decrease earlier. This is in contrast to the goods-producing sector, such as construction and manufacturing, which remained closed longer and where men are disproportionately represented (90.2% of the construction workforce was made up of men in 2020, and 70.9% of the manufacturing workforce was made up of men in 2020).
Conclusion
We examined the effect that the COVID-19 pandemic had on male and female unemployment rates in the United States. Our analysis indicates that female unemployment rates saw a larger increase than male unemployment rates in 2020, likely due to women’s disproportionate representation in vulnerable service-sector jobs. Additionally, we found that female unemployment rates returned to pre-pandemic levels eight months before male unemployment rates, demonstrating faster rehiring in those service-based industries. Our research, though providing a general overview of the effect that the COVID-19 pandemic had on male and female unemployment rates, does not account for race, age, or socioeconomic status. Future research could incorporate these variables to gain a more holistic understanding of the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the labor market.
References
- Bluedorn, John, Francesca Caselli, Niels-Jakob Hansen, Ippei Shibata, and Marina M. Tavares. 2022. “Gender and Employment in the COVID-19 Recession: Cross-Country Evidence on ‘She-Cessions.’” Labour Economics 81 (November): 102308. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2022.102308.
- Smith, Sean M., Roxanna Edwards, and Hao C. Duong. 2021. “Unemployment Rises in 2020, as the Country Battles the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Monthly Labor Review, June. https://doi.org/10.21916/mlr.2021.12.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2022. “December 2019 ‐ B‐5a. Employment of Women by Industry Sector, Seasonally Adjusted.” Bureau of Labor Statistics. November 18, 2022. https://www.bls.gov/ces/data/employment-and-earnings/2019/table5a_201912.htm.
- ———. 2025. “Civilian Unemployment Rate.” Bls.gov. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2025. https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-unemployment-rate.htm.