Despite slight progress in lower unemployment for women this past month, their overall employment rate has not completely returned to pre-pandemic levels, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There are still 1.8 million women missing from the labor force.
According to Katica Roy, gender economist and CEO of Pipeline Equity, there are two ways to bring them back into the labor market.
“The first is a more equitable workforce — that is, beyond pay, equity of opportunity,” Roy told Yahoo Finance Live.
For example, Roy noted, women make up 58% of college graduates and 47% of the labor force, yet only account for 8% of Fortune 500 CEOs. She described this as a “gap in opportunity.”
“The second piece is actually equitable skilling,” Roy said. “We leaped forward five years in terms of digital acceleration since the beginning of the pandemic. So the jobs that existed at the beginning don’t necessarily exist today. We need to skill women, in particular, into those jobs.”