Women File Majority of U.S. Jobless Claims After Shutdown

According to official figures collected and supplied to Statista by the Fuller Project, women filed the majority of new jobless claims across several U.S. states in the three weeks following the start of the COVID-19 shutdown. By mid-April, four weeks into the shutdown, initial jobless claims by women also remained well above their usual levels in many states.

Women filed between 51 and 60 percent of new claims for the week ending April 4 in Alabama, Utah, Rhode Island, New Mexico, Montana, Idaho and North Dakota, down from even higher percentages in the two weeks prior in almost all locations. That week, females were also responsible for 62 percent of new claims in Nebraska, 59 percent of new claims in Virginia and 56 percent of new claims in New Jersey.

Based on the data comprising 17 states in total, the Fuller Project suspects that most new jobless claims in the U.S. since the week of March 21 have in fact been filed by women. The project cites a statistic from Nebraska, shedding some light on the situation of females in the current job market. In the state, most new jobless claims came from waitresses and waiters, hairdressers and cosmetologists, retail salespeople, bartenders and childcare workers – all professions dominated by women in the U.S.

In Wyoming, Oregon and New York state, jobless claims by women hovered around the 50 percent mark during the three weeks in question. In the case of Wyoming, this still meant jobless claims by women roughly doubled after the shutdown started.

Women in the U.S. are still less likely to work outside the home than men (even though they now hold close to 50 percent of payroll jobs). The Bureau of Labor Statistics has historically seen fewer women apply for benefits (which they tie to the fact that women are normally less likely to lose jobs than men), explaining some of the previous underrepresentation of women in jobless claims.