From the ACLU, this is at Liberty.

I'm your host, Molly Kaplan.

In early October, the United States Labor Department reported that women were leaving the workforce at four times the rate of men.

And a few months earlier, a report from McKinsey Global revealed that while women made up just

43% of the workforce, they had borne 56% of COVID-related job losses.

This data, and much more, led one new source to call this moment America's first female recession.

What exactly is going on? Why are women losing and leaving jobs more than men during this global

pandemic? And what can we do about it? Here to answer these questions is Colleen Ammerman.

Amherman is the director of Harvard Business School's gender initiative. She is also

the co-author of an upcoming book, Glass Half Broken, Shattering the Barriers that Still Hold Women

Back at Work. Colleen, welcome to the podcast, and thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you, Molly. I'm happy to be here. I want to start with the big picture here. Back in May of this year, in spite of huge growth in unemployment and a lot of uncertainty about the pandemic, there was some optimism about ways in which normalizing working from home and more flexible hours might actually benefit women. But even back in May, you were skeptical.

You said of a paper making these claims,

while we share the author's hope,

we aren't convinced that the sudden expansion of remote work will end up benefiting women.

Now, as we speak, you seem to have been right to doubt those claims.

And as I mentioned in one article called this loss of

women in the workforce, America's first female recession. Colleen, what have we seen happen to

women in the workforce over the last several months in a sort of big picture way? Well, we've seen

really massive exits from the labor force, right? I mean, that's what all the data and statistics

are pointing to. I mean, that's kind of the top line, right? We're seeing women exit jobs reduce their work hours, even when they're able to stay in jobs at higher rates than men. And then I think, you know, we're also seeing subtler things. The latest women in the workplace study from McKinsey and Leanin just came out a week or two ago. And one of the

things that I noticed there was that I haven't seen covered elsewhere that they had a finding that

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