The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported a loss of 140,000 net jobs in December. That was bad enough but a closer analysis by the National Women’s Law Center revealed that with women losing 156,000 jobs and men gaining 16,000, women essentially accounted for all the jobs lost.

The center’s analysis also showed that 863,000 women left the labor force in December and only 27,000 returned. The center further noted that there were nearly 2.1 million fewer women in the labor force than there were in February, before the pandemic started.

The jobless rates were highest for women of color. Of the 6.3% of women unemployed in December, 9.1% were Latina and 8.4% were Black women. That compared with 5.7% for white women who were unemployed.

All the disparate data suggest that the pandemic trampled on women every which way. The industry sectors where women’s employment is more concentrated got pummeled. And once the stay-at-home orders took effect, many women were forced to scale back work to juggle childcare and caregiving duties for vulnerable senior. Domestic squabbles and violence affecting women also escalated.

According to the National Women’s Law Center analysis, the leisure and hospitality sector lost 498,000 jobs in December; women accounted for 57% of those job losses, despite making up 53% of the sector’s workforce. The government sector lost 45,000 jobs, with women accounting for 91% of those losses, even though they make up 57.5% of the sector’s workforce. And while the retail trade sector gained 120,500 jobs, women accounted for only 44% of those gains even though they make up 48.5% of the industry.

Michelle Courtright’s restaurant Fig & Farro in Minneapolis was among the many casualties of the pandemic. When Covid-19 hit, things began to slow at the thriving vegan eatery Courtright opened in 2018. She says friends and family told her things would be fine and encouraged her to hang on for a few months. “But it was not fine. We had to close down in March.”

She received the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program loan shortly after she closed; it helped her reopen her takeout business, but the sales were dismal, one-tenth that of normal sales, she says. And while the PPP money helped, she had to manage it in such a way that it would be forgiven.

She brought back all 35 employees, paid payroll taxes on them and spent several thousand dollars on safety and precautionary measures. But in the end, she says she lost money using the program loan. The restaurant was shuttered for good in May.

Hers joined tens of thousands of other businesses. Last year, the Yelp Economic Average showed that 163,735 businesses had closed by August 31, 2020. (That figure had improved since the start of the pandemic in March, when Yelp said 180,000 businesses closed.)

“I remember closing the restaurant,” Courtright says. “It was tragic. I was in a very, very deep depression, crying every day.” She adds that she was supported and encouraged to keep going by her family and professional network, as well as her financial advisor, Katherine Forrester Schneewind, the co-founder and CEO of High Note Wealth in Deephaven, Minn.

Courtright finished a cookbook she had been working on just in time for the holiday. And in the early spring she plans to open a new business, Walrus, a community marketplace that buys and sells affordable framed artwork. It will be located in a historic building in the Camden neighborhood of North Minneapolis. She says she’s filling a niche in a community with no shortage of local artists. “I am opening up on very limited funds, but it’s kind of fun,” she says.

Data from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce shows that female-owned small businesses took the brunt of the economic downturn, and they are more likely than male-owned small businesses to have reported a significant business decline since the pandemic started. Before the pandemic began, 67% of male-owned businesses ranked the overall health of their business as “somewhat or very good,” while only 60% of female-owned businesses did. By July, however, the number of female-owned businesses in good health had fallen 13 percentage points to 47%, while the number of male business owners reporting “somewhat or very good” health fell only 5 points to 62%.

And while economic conditions remain dicey for small business owners, entrepreneurs like Courtright are pivoting and keeping hope alive. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, applications for new businesses in the third quarter were 1.5 million, an 82% jump from the previous year (though the fourth quarter saw a 28.5% dip to 1.115 million).

Listening And Empathy
The devastating toll the pandemic has taken on women has kept financial advisors busy calming their clients’ fears about their finances. According to Schneewind, “It takes a lot of listening, a lot of empathy and then trying to comfort them with money they have saved to show them how we might have to pivot ever so slightly in their plan.” She has a roster of mostly wealthy clients and says in the past six months she has been fielding an unusual number of calls from her female clients.

“They are saying, ‘Hey, can you look at my financial plans really, really closely again, because I just want to know that I am going to be OK because I don’t know how much longer I can sustain this level of stress,’” Schneewind says. Like everyone else, her clients are having to juggle jobs and home life with children in virtual classrooms. “It just puts a lot of stress on you, and women tend to carry that stress.”

Advisor Michelle Connell agrees. “The biggest issue is that women are the caregivers of their families, and so whether you are somebody who is a working mother or taking care of older parents, you are affected when you are trying to do business from home,” says Connell, founder and owner of Portia Capital Management, a wealth management firm in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. “You are juggling your kids being on Zoom and trying to go along with their lesson plan and trying to keep track of what’s going on at work. It’s very difficult,” she says.

Connell, who serves on a local early childhood education advisory board, has seen firsthand the struggles many mothers endured when day care facilities closed. She says many women who depended on those facilities for childcare lack other options. Some relied on relatives, but many lost their jobs or scaled back because they worked in industries that have less flexibility and are the first to be hit economically in a situation like the pandemic.

“They are not working, they are not contributing as much to their 401(k) or savings, and because of how their professional situation has changed, they are going to have to work longer,” Connell says, adding that women in general were going to have to work longer anyway because they live longer.

A Burden On Retirement
Several recent studies have shown that women are concerned about the pandemic’s impact on their portfolio and their retirement. A study by Greenwood Village, Colo., retirement services provider Empower Retirement and its subsidiary Personal Capital found that 31% of women “barely have their head above water” while only 19% of men say the same, and only 54% of women are confident they can retire when they want while 67% of men are.

A survey from fintech company SimplyWise further found a record 32% of people in their 50s are now planning to postpone retirement from work, and the same goes for 21% of people in their 60s.

Domestic Strain
On top of all the stress of losing a job and shuffling work and home duties, women in unhealthy relationships and on the verge of divorce are stuck at home with soon-to-be exes.

Lili A. Vasileff, a financial planner specializing in money and divorce, points out that there is nowhere to go when the courts have shut down. “It’s not as if you can run to the court and say you want to file for divorce and then have an attorney protect you somehow by kicking out your spouse from the house or you are leaving. You are stuck, and you have a lot of challenges you have to get through,” says Vasileff, president of the firm Wealth Protection Management in Greenwich, Conn.

In the July 2020 issue of Financial Advisor, Vasileff asked “Is a Divorce Tsunami Coming?” She says the tsunami is now here. “I don’t know of any professional who is not super busy,” she says, noting that people may not have seen or heard about the wave of divorces because couples are seeking alternative dispute resolutions while the courts are closed—they’re either seeking mediation or “collaborative divorce,” which means the papers aren’t filed in court until the agreements are reached. She says attorneys are telling her that they are unable to get court dates until October.

One trend that’s been picking up in the last decade or so is “gray divorce,” where people over 50 leave long marriages, Vasileff explains. Another trend is that women age 50 to 64 are the ones initiating these breakups, but she adds that women have more significant money concerns after divorce than they do during marriage.

Citing surveys by Pew Research and Gallup Poll, Vasileff says women often don’t know how much it costs to live in retirement. “And the kicker to that is they think Social Security is going to be their primary source of income, and we all know how much that is if they are depending on the spouse’s record. It’s like half of that,” she says, explaining that the most you could possibly get this year is around $23,000. “So, if that doesn’t knock you off your feet, I don’t know what would.”

Carrie Gallaway, a managing partner at YorkBridge Wealth Partners in New York City, says her business clients are managing well because of the PPP loans they received. “Everybody who wanted one got one,” she says, noting that, while struggling, none of her clients had to give up their business.

Financial advisors have helped, she says.

“Thinking back to March and April and even a few times through the fall, there definitely were clients who, if they had not had our guidance, they would have either sold out their portfolios or not been able to get the PPP loans,” she says. “So really the ability to have somebody who is a partner and really is an advocate for them and their long-term goals was in a way probably life-changing.”

She says advisors can help clients face the financial curveballs bound to come at them. She posits that women especially feel they should do things on their own. “So, they almost feel like if they ask for help, then somehow they are a failure, but it’s the silliest thing because it’s like people will use a personal trainer all the time because they know they are not going to be motivated to exercise.” She adds that financial advisors make sure you are staying on track and doing contingency planning.

Women, Connell says, are too complacent about their portfolios. “They don’t look at their portfolios on a continual basis. They just throw their money into their 401(k)s and let it cruise,” she says. “We are just not very good about being strategic and tactical. We just assume it’s going to take care of itself and we let it fall off the radar, but women need to keep looking at that, even though we are in unusual circumstances.”

Vasileff, who also does pro bono work, says debt is also a problem, particularly for people going through divorce. She posits that people do not save enough. “That’s always been one of those sad statistics about the U.S., that we just aren’t a nation that saves enough, and I think when times are bad, people aren’t hesitating to invade their retirement assets, and that has long-term impact,” she says.