Job losses in other industries with greater proportions of male workers, like manufacturing, were much smaller. We have also seen recovery in service-sector jobs lag behind other sectors. Employment in industries that tend to have larger shares of female workers, such as leisure and hospitality, education, and health services, is still below pre-pandemic levels.
The losses for women are even larger when considering how fast these industries were growing before the pandemic. The shift to remote work may have been a mitigating factor for employment for women without college degrees. Overall, workers without college degrees were hit particularly hard by the pandemic recession because remote work was much more common for those with a degree.