Welcome to Season 2 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement,

and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department.

Our goal is to bring scientific evidence and experience to the public health news of the day

through informative interviews with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public

health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at

Public Health Question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast

episodes. Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Stefania Albanese, an economist who studies women in the workforce.

They discuss how a disproportionate number of women in the United States appear to be dropping

out of the workforce during the pandemic, presumably to care for their children and to oversee

virtual learning. They talk about what this could mean for their careers.

Let's listen.

Stefanya Albanese, thanks so much for joining me.

Thank you for having me.

So today, we are going to talk about the impact

of the pandemic-related recession is having on women.

Talk to me about what we're seeing in terms of women

in the workplace. Well, I would identify two separate phases. So the first phase was in March

in April and early May when we had all the government-mandated shutdowns and even in the states

that did not have that, just a lot of concern about catching coronavirus

from establishments, you know, with a lot of contact with workers from the standpoint of

employees or with other customers and workers from the standpoint of customers.

...